


A Thousand Words For Snow

by Schistosity



Series: Those Who Speak [1]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Backstory spoilers, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Families of Choice, Fantasy Racism, Gen, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, i'm playing fast and loose with wizards of the coast canon and only gary gygax himself can stop me
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-07
Updated: 2020-04-14
Packaged: 2020-06-23 17:54:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 21,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19706494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schistosity/pseuds/Schistosity
Summary: A series of studies on the Mighty Nein and their language proficiencies. How language fails us, connects us, and defines us.1. Infernal:In which Jester can't find the words.2. Halfling/Goblin:In which Nott learns a language against her will.3. Common:In which Beau is taught and teaches in return.4. Zemnian:In which Caleb pieces himself back together.5. Celestial:In which Yasha defines divinity.6. Orcish:In which Fjord finds his own voice.7. Giant/Elvish:In which Caduceus speaks to the wild places.





	1. Infernal

**Author's Note:**

> I've always found native languages in D&D very interesting pieces of characterization that the standard rules sort of thrust upon a character. There's a lot of depth to be explored there that isn't capitalised on very often. But hey! What am I here for if not to reshape the carefully crafted legacy of TSR, Inc. with my bare hands for my own amusement? 
> 
> Each chapter is going to focus on a character and the language 5e D&D considers to be their "native" one. This is going to end up being half character study, half conlang lesson, and half prosey musings on the nature of language and relationships. That's three halves if you're counting but I'm here to write, not to do math.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jester can't find the words.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.”  
> ― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

Of the six languages Jester’s mother speaks, she uses Infernal the least.

(Even less than Gnomish, which Jester finds odd, because before she leaves the Coast she can count the number of gnomes she knows on one hand)

Marion Lavorre only speaks Infernal to her daughter and in Jester’s young eyes it becomes their secret, special language.

Later, Jester will learn that Marion doesn’t speak Infernal to anyone but her because it’s widely considered uncommon and scary and fiendish. It’s not entirely useable in polite society, but this doesn’t stop Jester from learning it.

Infernal is a second-hand language. It belongs to fiends first and their offspring second. In that way it is quite limited, because fiends don’t feel the same things tieflings do. They don’t get sad when their favourite bakery closes, they don’t contentedly people-watch young families in the market, they don’t like soft toys or the gentle embraces of friends.

Infernal is passionate, fiery, and full of burning, intense emotion, blood bonds and dark thoughts. It is not gentle like the Ruby and her daughter.

So, when Jester’s mother tells her she loves her she tells her in Common. Because while there is a word in Infernal for the undying, earth-shaking bond between a mother and child there is no soft word for the same feeling.

“My dear,” she says in her rich Coastal accent. “My little Sapphire. My bright star.”

Infernal is Jester’s mother tongue, in every sense of the expression.

Jester does not meet many other interesting tieflings until she meets Mollymauk Tealeaf and in her Grand Ranking of All Tieflings Ever he very quickly finds his way to the number two spot.

He’s not like her mother in the slightest. He’s loud and witty and invasive in a way that Jester adores but some others hate (But he doesn’t care. She likes that too.) And most importantly he speaks the secret, special language that her mother taught her.

The first time she hears him speak Infernal, he’s spitting insults in it like firecrackers across the battlefield and she has to clap a hand over her mouth to stop herself from laughing in the middle of the fight. It’s crass and cruel and _scary_ and she _loves_ it.

He winks at her, like it’s a little joke between them. It very quickly becomes that. Suddenly, Infernal isn’t just something that belongs to Jester and her mother, it’s something that belongs to her and Molly, too.

They tell each other little jokes and make snide quips about guards right under their noses. They build a small repertoire of in-jokes that would make even Jester’s mother blush. It’s a little piece of home that Molly’s keeping alive for her.

She’s lying on the bed in the girl’s room at the Leaky Tap, picking at the remnants of their fifth charcuterie board of the night, her legs draped over Molly’s knees as he absently shuffles his cards. Recent events have Jester thinking about the word _Mother_.

Mother. _Mhité._ In Infernal, it connotes utter dedication and responsibility. Something in the blood that cannot be swayed by Gods or man. It makes her think of home, of her mother’s long hair and strong embrace. It’s a good word.

“Don’t you think it’s, like, super nice?” She muses.

“What’s nice, dear?” He replies.

“That Nott thinks of Caleb like her son?”

She says it all quiet-like, even though no one else is awake, even though Nott and Caleb are all the way downstairs in that little room with the skeleton.

“Eh. I suppose,” he says. Jester wonders if he feels bad for doubting Nott earlier. She knows she does.

“I feel bad.”

Molly just grunts all non-committal.

“Do you think they’ll stay?”

“Oh, now _that’s_ a question,” he sighs, and it’s only now that he puts his cards down. “I don’t know. They’re sort of their own agents, aren’t they? We all are.”

“I want us all to stay together,” she continues.

“We aren’t leaving any time soon, dear.”

“Yasha left us. You said she always comes back, but would you leave us if she asked you to?”

“We’re not the same as Nott and Caleb,” Molly says. “We do our own things. I like you too much to leave, I think.”

“I think they want to stay though,” she says, very softly.

“Who? Nott and Caleb?”

Jester nods. “I want them to want to stay,” she whispers now, ignoring how childish the request sounds. For a second she wonders if Molly hasn’t heard her, but then his voice breaks the silence and he’s speaking in Infernal.

 _“Oh, we can’t ever know people like that, Jester_ ,” he whispers, the Infernal hissing and spitting off his tongue like quiet flames. _“We can only know as much of them as they let us see.”_

 _“I see that Caleb is lonely,”_ Jester says, keeping her words quiet even though no one would be able to understand them. _“I think he’s not so lonely with us.”_

Molly huffs a laugh, but nods. _“And?”_

_“I think Nott loves Caleb very much. I think she’ll go along with what he does because she loves him.”_

There is no Infernal word for the kind of love Jester is trying to talk about. She wants to talk about unconditional, soft _Devotion_ , but Infernal is not a soft language. She resorts to using the word for _Zeal_ , which is wrong, but Molly seems to know what she’s trying to say because he nods.

“ _Ah,_ ” he mutters with a wry smile. “ _We are each of us beings of unfathomable depths. And we fit together in such interesting ways._ ”

Jester wonders how Molly can make such a violent language say beautiful things.

_“That’s very pretty, Molly.”_

_“Not as pretty as you, Jester.”_

Molly is dead less than a month later. Outside the Sour Nest Jester sits under the wide night sky and watches her tears collide with the empty pages of her sketchbook.

There is no Infernal word for the kind of love she felt for him, the kind of love she lost. Infernal is too limited for the kind of person Jester is. For the way she feels. She is too soft for a devil-thing.

But Common is uniquely limited, too, in its own way. Common has just one word for _Death_ and it doesn’t seem like enough at all, not compared to the thousand words for death in Infernal. There is no word for the kind of love she had for Molly but there’s a word for how he died.

 _Kricthá_. To die alone in battle.

But who around her now can appreciate this? Infernal had been _theirs_. Now it is just _hers_.

(She cannot find words the next time she casts hellish rebuke. She just _screams_.)

They lose Yasha at the grave. She walks off into the woods and they don’t do anything to stop her. Molly always told them that Yasha would find her way back but what would she coming back to now? For the first time Jester watches Yasha’s receding form and wonders if it’s the last time she’ll ever see her.

 _Unfathomable depths._ Molly’s voice echoes in Jester’s head. _We fit together in such interesting ways._

Jester wonders if she’s watching them fall apart.

They’re on the road back to Zadash when a tiny green hand takes hers after dinner. Jester blinks the trails of firelight from her vision and focuses on Nott’s face, all covered in shadow save for her glowing yellow eyes.

“You’re staring into space,” Nott says. “Are you feeling okay?”

“Yes! Why wouldn’t I be?” Jester says. She lies. Because she’s seen Nott when she’s upset—at the grave and fighting goblins and in their dinky little room at the Leaky Tap, with an extra platinum pressed into her hand as an weak apology—and she sees the way Nott fusses—over her flask and Jester’s love life and Caleb’s well-being (and their's too, which is a new development)—and she doesn’t want to give a woman who is already stretched so thin one more thing to worry about.

“O-okay,” she says, and Jester can see the doubt in her wide yellow eyes.

“I promise, Nott. I’ll let you know when you need to worry about me.”

Nott hesitates just a little before heading back to the group on the other side of the fire.

 _“I am such a liar,”_ Jester whispers, the Infernal spitting in harmony with the crackling flames.

There’s a laugh from behind her, and a sharp, _“Aren’t we all, sometimes?”_

Jester gasps and turns around, only to find herself looking up at the ever-graceful form of Ophelia Mardûn, towering over her in a fine, woollen cloak.

“May I sit?” She asks, now in accented Common. Her voice would make Jester think of Caleb if not for the fact it belongs to a woman who definitely isn’t as friendly.

There is something about Ophelia that reminds Jester of her mother. The long soft hair, though much longer and darker, has the same sheen. Her slender hands, her delicate clothes, her fangs…

And at the same time, she is so very unlike her mother in every way that counts. There is something cold in Ophelia that Jester does not like. It’s shrewd and calculating and cold, like the air is here in the North. Marion was always warm, like the Coast. Jester has never missed her more than she does right now.

“You speak Infernal?” Jester asks in a small voice. It might be a dumb question, but she doesn’t know or rightly care.

Ophelia laughs, “Infernal was the language of my mother. I wonder if it is the same for you?”

Jester doesn’t know if that’s a lucky guess or something more.

“Yes,” she says. “I don’t know many tieflings except her, really.”

“Your party member… the one whose grave we stopped by. He was a tiefling, _ja_?’

She feels cold crawl in her throat. She bites it down.

 _“Yes.”_ She lets the Infernal crackle off her tongue. _“He was like family.”_

The infernal word for family seems to catch Ophelia off-guard and Jester is not surprised. Infernal is achingly literal when it talks about bonds, and the word Jester uses is one to denote blood relationships. It’s not quite the right word for what she means, but it’s almost enough.

 _“I don’t have the right words,”_ Jester says, _“What I feel is not for devils to feel, I think.”_

There’s a grey hand on her shoulder, holding it delicately. For a moment, Jester can pretend it’s Molly or her Mother holding her instead of a stranger.

 _“Nonsense,”_ says Ophelia. _“Emotion is strength. What you feel is always right.”_

She nods towards the far side of the fire and Jester follows her gaze, to where Nott is embroiled in some kind of argument with Fjord, Caleb and Beau are off to the side going over notes, and Caduceus sits vigil (or maybe he’s sleeping?)

 _“Pain must be felt,”_ Ophelia says. _“That is what family is for. You say you cannot find the right words but you are working on your own, Jester. Perhaps others can find the words you cannot?”_

Marion Lavorre is the most beautiful woman in the world. This is a fact.

They find their way to the Coast and the first thing Jester does in Nicodranas is seek out her mother. She throws herself into the Ruby’s open arms and pure, unadulterated delight ignites in her heart like wildfire. _Mhité,_ she thinks as she buries her face into her mother’s shoulder. Dedication and responsibility and a bond the Gods can’t break. Oh, how she’s missed her.

Jester spends the night telling her mother every story she can think of from her time away.

She most definitely talks about Molly.

“You would have liked him, Momma,” she says, playing with a piece of her mother’s jewellery. “He had the worst taste in men and the best taste in women and—oh, oh!—he wore more jewellery than that old legislator from Port Damali—you remember the one? I think he would have liked you a lot.”

“I’m sure I would have liked him too, my love,” says Marion, running a hand through her daughter’s hair. “I’m very sorry.”

“He spoke Infernal with me,” she says. “I didn’t feel so lonely when he did that. It reminded me of you.”

Marion smiles, sad, but a lot of her smiles are sad. “And do you feel lonely now?”

“No, I have the others… It was just… a little piece of home, you know? And now it’s gone.”

 _Momma,_ she wants to ask, _is there a word in our language for what Molly was to me? A brother? Not in blood but in language and laughter and love? Is there a word for a family I’m choosing, all on my own? If there is, I can’t find it._

But she doesn’t say that. She says nothing and her mother presses a kiss to her forehead, and they talk about other things. And then she leaves to be on the sea and when she comes back there’s barely any time to see her mother before fate whisks her away once more.

They’re on the way to Felderwin to see if Nott’s halfling friend is okay.

(It will take a little while for the Nein to learn that this is not the whole truth, that Yeza is more than her friend and Nott is more than Nott, but for now it doesn’t matter.)

They’re in Alfield, finishing their fourth (Fifth? Sixth?) round of drinks, when that little green hand finds Jester’s and those big yellow eyes stare up into purple ones with a knowing kind of sadness.

“Want to go for a walk, Jes?” Jester nods and lets Nott pull her outside.

It’s not as cold now as it was last time they were in the Empire, but Jester still hates the constant chill in the air. It’s not like the Coast, and now that she’s been back there and left again the withdrawal is fresh. She wonders if Fjord feels like this too.

“I wanted to say thank you,” Nott says, pulling Jester from her thoughts.

Jester is confused. “Why?”

“For leaving your mother to come help me, I… I know that must have been hard.”

Jester has never seen Nott look this sad before. It’s a truly awful expression, one she never wants to see on her again.

“Of _course_ I’d help you, Nott! You’re my friend, you—”

Nott clasps Jester’s hands tightly in her own.

“A child shouldn’t be far from their mother.” Her yellow eyes seem to glow with emotion. Oh, Jester realises, she’s crying. “It’s not _fair_ and I’m so sorry and so, _so_ grateful.”

(It will take a little while for the gravity of that statement to hit Jester. In a little while it will make perfect, crushing sense that Nott knows how Jester feels. But for now, they are just kind words.) 

It takes a moment for Jester to realise she’s crying too.

“I miss her, Nott.”

“I know.”

“I’m supposed to be an adult, you know? I’m supposed to be able to handle myself.”

“I know, but you don’t have to be strong all the time. You don’t have to have all the answers to everything.”

Nott guides Jester down to eye level and wraps her arms around her, giving the tightest hug her tiny body can give. Jester leans into the embrace and feels Nott’s hand rub small circles on her back, steadying and strong.

“Sometimes you just have to be sad, okay?”

 _Mhité_ , Jester thinks.

Nott is not her mother. Nott’s hair is wiry and green where her mother’s is soft and dark. Nott’s teeth are jagged and yellowed where her mother’s are delicate, white fangs. Nott’s skin is a sallow green, Nott’s singing voice is terrible, Nott’s hands are rough.

But her embrace is strong and her love is real. Jester’s not quite sure when the transition happened, but now Nott’s fussing extends to them all. It’s a soft kind of worrying that makes her ache for home just as much as it makes her feel like this, here on the road, is her home now. _Mhité_. Dedication, responsibility, a bond the Gods can’t break.

Maybe that’s how she feels.

It’s not the right word—it never seems to be in Infernal—but it’s tapping into a fraction of what this nebulous emotion is. Maybe she doesn’t need a word. Maybe what she feels for this family (because they’ve gone through too much and loved each other too strongly for it not to be a family) can just remain nameless.

This is _Love_ in its grandest sense and there’s no word in any language that can describe it.

And that’s enough.


	2. Halfling/Goblin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Nott learns a language against her will.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Language is the only homeland.”  
> ― Czesław Miłosz

Nott does not speak Goblin well, not like Halfling, which she speaks with the ease of a native speaker. No. Her Ghukliak is clipped and clumsy, like a child’s.

This is not her fault; she did not have very long to learn it.

Her lack of fluency in a language that should technically be her mother tongue is slow to come to light, but when it does it presents an interesting kind of puzzle. It confuses the Nein right up until the moment it starts making perfect sense.

But before then. Before she sits with them by a river next to a burning town (her town) and secrets spill from her lips like rushing water, it is an incongruity.

And even before then. Before she finds hope in the corner of a prison cell and family in a group of strangers, it is a liability.

Veth—because the quiet part of her brain still thinks of itself as Veth—does not cry in front of the goblins. She is stoic in front of them. She is strong. Veth is gone but her ghost clings to the bones of the goblin girl with tenacity, trying so desperately not to break.

“I don’t understand what you’re telling me to do,” the goblin girl says for the fifth time. She speaks to them in Common. “I know you can understand me. Tell me what to do.”

The old crone who is teaching her to weave wicker cages (the kind they held Veth’s son in, but she’s trying not to think about it) spits at her before saying something to her in a language as twisted and gnarled as her face. It cuts like a whip.

Ghukliak is all hard consonants and cracking syllables. There is not a gentle sound in any of their words; gentle things cannot survive in their language in the same way they rarely survive in their camps.

Halfling is _all_ gentle sounds. It’s round vowels and soft th’s that roll from your tongue like honey.

“I don’t understand you!” She cries. “ _Dath_ , you stupid woman, I—”

The old woman’s eyes light up with fury as she catches the Halfling curse. In an instant the hilt of a knife is cracked across the goblin-that-is-Veth’s knuckles. She cries out, and the woman takes it as a chance to lean forward, blade pressed over the second joint of her student’s index finger.

“You are not halfling, _grekka_ ,” says the crone in an inexplicable switch to broken Common, laced with a sharp Ghukliak insult. “Do not speak it.”

 _Grekka._ It means _Halfling Woman_ literally but colloquially it means something closer to _Useless Whore_. It is the only word in their language they have bothered to teach her and she suspects it’s so they can see comprehension in her eyes when they speak down her. 

Some spiteful part of her that is still Veth wants to ask why they call her _grekka_ if she’s “not a halfling”, but she wants to keep her fingers attached to her hands. She stills her tongue.

“You are _ghukliak_. Not halfling.” The woman jabs a bony finger into her pupil’s chest. “Not anymore. Not understand? Learn.”

The last word is spat like a command, and the-goblin-who-is-barely-Veth finds her voice.

“Learn?” she says, her provincial halfling accent slipping into her razor wire voice with all the wrongness of snow in summer.

“ _Czem_.”

“Sem?” It takes her a moment to realise what the old woman wants. “Sem… is that… Learn?”

“ _Czem_ ,” the elder goblin insists, nodding as she corrects the pronunciation.

“ _Czem_ ,” the goblin girl repeats. Her teacher laughs and it comes out as a screech that makes the younger woman jump where she sits.

“See? Not halfling! Not!”

Not.

She’s not a halfling. She’s not a goblin. She’s not Veth. She’s not much of anything at all.

Nott’s gnarled goblin fingers find their rhythm in the cage weave after that. As she crafts, she wills herself to pick out patterns in her teacher’s babbling speech. By the end of the night she knows the word for learn along with the words for cage, chief, death, grass, and fire.

She waits to start crying until she beds down alone, fingers bleeding from overwork and mind roiling with vocabulary she wishes she could forget. Nott tries not to speak Halfling in the camp again.

The next time Nott speaks Halfling is quite a while later. She is no longer in the camp, letting slip accidental gentle syllables from her still-foreign mouth and waiting for punishment. She’s in a town called Brynden, looking at her masked reflection in a storefront window, her spindly fingers absently twisting through a hole in Caleb Widogast’s coat while he tries and fails to get the halfling shopkeep to fork over a book for a fraction of its price.

Knowing Halfling is no longer a liability.

 _“If you give it to him for five silver now, I’ll pay the rest after he leaves,”_ she says in her _real_ mother tongue. The words taste like woodsmoke and fresh bread and Yeza.

The shopkeep and Caleb both start, eyeing her with a mixture of surprise and confusion. Nott dips her head to keep her not-halfling face from the shopkeep’s scrutinous eye.

_“Interesting accent, darlin’. Where are you from?”_

_“I’m not here to talk about me. I’ll give you five gold once you give him the book and he leaves. Don’t say anything to him.”_

The shopkeep smirks and turns back to Caleb.

“I believe we have a deal, sir.”

Nott catches up with Caleb later as they head back to their camp on the outskirts of town, slipping her fingers back into the tear in his coat she’s been working on.

“What was that language?” He asks softly. He has always spoken to her softly.

“Halfling,” she answers.

“I did not know you spoke Halfling.”

Nott loves the way he says _Halfling_ , with his lips curled in just the right way to make the “F” sound unusually soft and air-y. His accent holds echoes of a foreign countryside that Veth never saw in her lifetime, but there’s something comfortable about the provincial nature of it.

She never asks, but she sees a farm boy in him sometimes. She used to have that quality, too, and she likes that there’s something intrinsically similar between them.

She doesn’t ask, though; she doesn’t want him to ask back.

“Y-yeah,” she says, answering the implied question. “I, uh, picked it up a while ago.”

“And you speak Common and Goblin, also?” It’s rhetorical, but she nods. He makes a soft, surprised-but-pleased sound. “You are very learned for a goblin.”

 _Czem_ , she corrects in her head _, don’t say Learn again or they’ll cut off your fingers, Nott, and you need those fingers to break things for them later_.

“Yeah,” she says, and she must sound disappointed or something because Caleb leans down to her, ruffles her hair, and says:

“I meant that as a good thing, _mein freund_. Thank you for today.”

There is no word for friend in Ghukliak because goblins don’t have friends. Goblins only have enemies and allies. There is a word for it in Halfling, though, because Halfling is gentle and what is gentler than this? Someone who thinks she’s something?

 _Yaren_. It means something close to _Brother_ , though not familial. Nott wonders if that’s entirely right.

She says nothing as she takes his hand. He squeezes it a little and the word _Fethen_ slips unbidden into her mind. It means someone to protect—and _that_ feels right. She continues to say nothing, but this silence is a contented one.

Later, when two becomes seven, Nott’s limited Ghukliak becomes a contradiction.

Beau loves contradictions.

The fact Nott speaks Halfling is of passing interest to Beau and the others. Only Beau speaks it, and even then, her comprehension was one developed for business, not fluency, so any of Nott’s native speaker quirks are lost on the woman.

It’s Nott’s child-like grasp on the goblin tongue that piques the interests of the others. _Especially_ Beau.

Caleb notices, of course, but he has either the good graces or lack of will to speak to her about it. Beau, on the other hand, has no graces to speak of and an over-abundance of will.

“What’s the Goblin word for goblin?” Beau asks.

“ _Ghukliak_ ,” Nott says, hating how well the sounds snap around her sharp teeth like they’re meant to be there. She doesn’t want them to be there. “Why?”

They’re making camp on their way to Zadash and Nott does not like Beau very much. They haven’t been together very long, and Beau likes to push her in ways Caleb never has.

“Just wondering.” Beau pauses—but before Nott can leave the conversation she says, “What’s the Goblin word for human?”

Nott is pleasantly surprised to find that she doesn’t know. She doesn’t _remember_. Oh, how the old crone would react if she saw her now! She’d threaten more than her fingers, that’s for certain _._

_Humans are prey! You must know the name of your prey, Nott!_

The Halfling word for human is _Hithrem_ , which is a lot of pretty sounds that are entirely useless in this scenario. Beau already knows that. Beau wants to know the Goblin word. The _Ghukliak_ word.

_You must call us Ghukliak, Nott. Goblin is dirty. Goblin is someone else’s name for a monster._

The realisation of her lack of knowledge has turned from pleasurable to panic-inducing. Beau has noticed. It’s too late to lie. Nott is drowning. Again.

“I don’t know,” she says. Beau raises an eyebrow.

“I don’t speak Ghuk—” she winces, biting the word in half. “I don’t speak Goblin anymore and I don’t want to.”

“I’m…” She doesn’t finish the thought and Nott can practically see Fjord’s courtesy lessons rattling around in the girl’s head. What she manages is a “jeez, sorry” that is only believable because Nott knows Beau just enough by now to recognise the effort.

“It’s alright.”

Later, when a temporary six becomes a permanent seven, they’re jumped by goblins on the way north for the Gentleman. The goblins are a chattering horde and Nott slips amongst them easily. It’s the best way to protect her friends, even if it makes her feel disgusting.

 _Thanerin,_ it’s the Halfling word for _Brotherhood_ and she can’t bear to let herself say it out loud yet. She thinks it though. She thinks it a lot lately. She thinks it now.

 _“I’ll finish them off, you take care of the cart with the horses!”_ It’s the kind of order that would get thrown at her the handful of times the clan let her come on raids—before they realised she was just as bad at being a fighter as she was at speaking their language.

One of the goblins beside her runs off immediately, but the other glances at her strangely.

Fuck, what has she screwed up now? The tense? The conjugation? She speaks her supposed “mother tongue” at the level of a child and here is where it kills her.

It doesn’t kill her, though. They all live to die another day and Nott pretends not to notice the six expressions of confusion and pity she gets while she pulls her arrows from their attackers’ chests, as she curses their race and spits on their bodies.

Later, after seven becomes four becomes three becomes seven, they are waylaid by goblins on the way back to Zadash. They fight better now because they know what happens if they don’t. Later, she points her crossbow at the only survivor’s throat.

_“Why are you following us?”_

The goblin spits at her, a curse in their shared tongue ( _his_ tongue, not hers, it was never supposed to be hers) that she never had the displeasure of learning in her clan (not hers, never hers, she was never part of them).

With the flickering firelight of camp far behind them, Beau crushes the goblin’s fingers with her staff. This is morbidly familiar. The rattling, piercing scream. The crooked joints. Nott flexes her own involuntarily.

 _“Tell us why you are following us.”_ She does not ask it as a question this time.

 _“We’re here ------ to -----.”_ The goblin wheezes, clutching his hand to his chest.

Nott blinks. _Oh_ _fuck_ , she thinks.

 _“S-say again?”_ She asks. She is acutely aware of how Beau takes pause. She can’t hear the content of the conversation, but she can hear Nott’s questioning, nervous tone.

 _“I said we’re here ------ to -----,”_ the goblin spits, _“------ clean your ears out, bitch.”_

Nott’s blood runs cold. She turns to Beau.

“I, uh, don’t know what he’s saying.”

“What?!” Beau looks incredulous.

The goblin laughs, high-pitched and grating like metal. _“Grekka.”_

Something small and delicate inside Nott—the thing that was apparently keeping her composure together—snaps. She screams like something possessed and before Beau can grab her she’s sending her clenched fist right into the goblin’s nose.

She leaves with bloodied knuckles and no usable information.

“Are we going to talk about what happened back there?” Beau says, jogging to catch up. Nott doesn’t look back to see what Beau’s done with their prisoner.

Beau doesn’t push much anymore, not after Molly, at least not in the same way. Fjord’s trying to make her nicer and Molly’s doing something posthumously to drive her forward. Nott knows if she puts up a high enough wall Beau will back off.

“I’m out of practice. More than I thought. Sorry.” It’s not a lie, but it’s not the truth.

Beau mouths the word _Practice_ , looking confused, and Nott slips into the shadows.

Later still, after Nott stops being just-Nott and Caleb stops being just-Caleb, her fluency in Halfling and piss-poor Goblin become things that are obvious in hindsight.

 _“Hey, Nott, can we talk?”_ Beau asks in a moment of reprieve in the tunnels. Her Halfling accent is a fun blend of Northern and wrong, but it’s still like music to Nott’s ears. Halfling sounds like the apothecary and Luc and warm summer air.

 _“Sure,”_ Nott says. _“In Halfling?”_

_“It’s easier than Goblin, huh?”_

Nott shoots her a look. Beau gives a nervous attempt at a smile. The two of them are aware of the covert looks they’re getting from the rest of the group, but Jester quickly distracts any prying ears by launching into a very energetic retelling of chapter eleven of _Tusk Love_.

 _“I, uh, I noticed before that you weren’t very good at Goblin_ ,” Beau says. _“You speak really proper, too. I guess that makes sense now.”_

 _“I didn’t have very long to learn Goblin,”_ Nott says. _“Just the year I was with them. I’m fine with being bad at it. It’s not who I am.”_

 _“I know,”_ Beau says. _“I just wanted to say sorry if I ever made you uncomfortable about it.”_ Then she adds: _“Halfling is nicer, anyway. Your, uh… your accent is pretty.”_

Nott realises that Beau is trying to compliment her and something unbidden and warm begins to blossom in her chest.

_“Thank you, Beau.”_

_“It is my pleasure, Nott.”_

Beau’s odd formality makes Nott smile. It’s so unlike her and is obviously being brought on by a lack of vocabulary, an education meant for business, or both. Nott’s thoughts fly back to Luc, learning the word “Sir” and thinking he had to use it for everyone, including his confused parents. What a fun month that had been.

“You can say _perlin_ instead.” She provides the Halfling word in a blanket of hushed Common.

Beau blinks. “What’s that mean?”

“It’s like “no worries” or something,” Nott explains. “I think it’s more your style.”

Beau smiles now, one of the genuine ones that isn’t mangled to high heaven by her attempts to make it polite, a crooked one that shows the little gap in her teeth. Nott likes it.

“Thanks,” she says.

 _“Perlin,”_ replies Nott.

The seven of them head deeper into the unknown and Nott thinks the word _Thanerin—B_ _rotherhood—_ without hesitation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> some notes on language: Learning languages is hard and it gets even harder the older we get. The best time to learn a language is when you're very young (we're talking 0-5), because your brain is still developing. Immersion is the fastest way to learn a language, but even so, it's pretty impressive that Nott canonically managed to learn semi-fluent Goblin after only a year of living with them! She doesn't have the second highest intelligence in the Nein for nothing!


	3. Common

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Beau is taught and teaches in return.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “The language of the heart is mankind's main common language.”  
> ― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

Beau has always been good at picking up languages. She has the head for it.

Her parents see this as an asset. The Cobalt Soul see it as an advantage. She is taught Halfling by her father, who wants her to take over the family business. She is taught Deep Speech and Dwarvish by the monks, who want her to translate and read.

Beau does not use the languages she is taught. They are not hers.

Here’s the thing about Beauregard Lionett: she’s smart— _very_ smart, in fact, one might stoop to calling her intelligent—but she doesn’t like to be _taught_. Sitting in a classroom all day with the ambient drone of a dusty professor buzzing holes into her eardrums is about the closest thing to hell she can imagine for a very long time. 

And here is another thing about Beauregard Lionett: she can speak well when she needs to, she can lie better than most, but she doesn’t like _speaking_. Beau is a woman of action. She believes she can say more with a fist to the face, a cold shoulder, and quirk of the eyebrow than she ever could with words. 

Only one language “belongs” to Beau, and that’s Common, a language she shares with everyone. It’s a language of trade and commerce and pretty much every sentient being in Exandria speaks it.

She wonders often if that really makes it _hers_ at all.

She is seven years old and lives in a manor by a vineyard in Kamordah, high up in the mountains where the terracotta-tiled floors are cold all year round and her parents are even more so. Kamordah speaks Common—Kamordah _is_ common. It has no real reason to speak anything else or be anything else. Neither does Beau.

But Beau’s father is a man much too big in his ambitions to be content being _common_. He does business beyond the confines of his culture, and this drive for wealth and industry connection is why Beau learns Halfling.

A necessary fraternisation, her mother might say. 

The Halfling that Beau learns is a stolen thing, ripped from the mouths of a people far more hardworking than the Lionett family ever could be. It’s soft and gentle and very unlike Beau, who has never been soft or gentle in her life. 

The halflings she learns from are workers from the vineyard. Their names are Nula and Marc and her father pays them slightly-more-than-minimum-wage to teach his rowdy daughter a language she doesn’t not want to be taught. 

Nula and Marc teach Beau their language as a professional courtesy to their employer. They won’t even teach her the swear words, which young Beau believes to be the only thing worth learning. They do not like her and she hates them and the end result is a knowledge of Halfling so formal and rigid it’s barely useful in speaking to a people so jovial and free with each other. 

Beau doesn’t even want Halfling, not really. Beau wants something that belongs to her—something not boring and not borrowed. 

But Common is not hers; it belongs to everyone.

Beau meets Tori. Everything changes.

Tori is tall and beautiful and sharp as a tack and Beau is young and loves her with more of her heart than she has right to give.

Tori is of the Empire, like Beau, but without the hard edges that usually suggests in a person. She is kind and accommodating and colourful. She is not _common_.

“It’s kinda unfair,” Beau says one day. “That everyone has to learn Common.”

Tori pauses from where she’s twirling Beau’s hair gently around her finger (Beautiful fingers, Beau thinks, but that’s besides the point). “What do you mean?”

Beau rolls over on the bed, now face to face with the older girl. “I mean it feels like the Common language is a homogenising cultural steamroller that punishes non-speakers on a social level. And that sucks.”

Tori whistles playfully. “Big words, Professor Lionett. You really have to work on your pillow talk.”

Beau swats at her. Tori laughs. 

“You going to do something about it, Miss Social Justice?”

Beau huffs. “Probably not. I dunno… I’m just thinking.”

Tori sighs, and goes back to playing with Beau’s hair. “Well, I’m glad the Empire bigwigs here never bothered to learn something besides Common. It makes our codes easier to come up with.”

Beau closes her eyes and laughs. She drops the subject.

They use Elvish in their codes when they smuggle wine, because no one in common little Kamordah speaks it. Beau picks up the basics, because of course she does, but the codes aren’t the important part of the language she creates with Tori.

They make their _own_ language, of touches and glances and whispers and gestures, and they build a culture of rebellion and crime and love.

For a while Beau is just Beau. Not imperial Beau, not common Beau, just Beau. Tori’s Beau. She doesn’t have to think about her weird sense of national identity or skewed place in the world. She can just _be_. 

And then Tori is gone.

The only thing that gave Beau’s life any semblance of colour is gone. Small rebellions are not fruitful in the Empire, Beau knows, staring with steely, red-rimmed eyes at her father. 

Beau leaves Kamordah some time later in the back of a cart, beaten to high heaven, watching the Lionett manor fade away in the murky twilight. She does not let herself cry, but if she had it would have been for Tori, not her parents. It would have been for the only person she’d ever cared about.

The only person who’d ever made her feel _un-common_.

“You’re a fighter,” says the monk next to her, not so much as a split lip on her to back up her claims. “That will be useful.” 

_Not enough of a fighter to go back for Tori,_ she thinks. _Not enough of a fighter to kick your ass._

Her language is mundane and ordinary and the Empire that gave it to her is _selfish_ , like she is. Perhaps it is fitting that she speaks Common. Maybe that’s all she’ll ever deserve to be.

At the Cobalt Soul they teach her Dwarvish and Deep Speech. She picks them up; she’s good at picking up languages. 

But the Soul is academic. They are cold and technical. They teach her in Common because it’s the language of trade and international relations and the Soul are all about international knowledge. 

Her native Common is an asset as much as her head for other languages is. Common means she can talk to everyone, in all corners of the globe. 

But it also means other cultures pass her by. Her common tongue is met with common tongue. She is not given windows into a world outside commonality—a world outside the Empire.

Until the Mighty Nein.

The Mighty Nein are even more multicultural than their bilingual name suggests. 

Jester and Molly speak Common, but that doesn’t stop the two of them from snapping Infernal insults across the battlefield and spitfire quips at each other in public. They are both so loud and colourful—like small suns, like something blinding. She doesn’t learn Infernal, but she learns other things. 

From Jester she learns kindness and joy, she learns that naïvety does not equal incompetence, and she learns what a daughter who is loved by her mother looks like. Jester laughs freely, and Beau learns too.

From Molly she learns loss, a different kind of loss than she felt with Tori. Tori’s loss was a bitter sting, but at least Tori is alive. She tries to muster words at his grave—Common words, for a man who was anything but common.

The heart of Beau’s eulogy is not spoken. She has no traditional burial practice to give Molly or eloquent goodbyes to whisper to his grave. No. Beau has resolve. She has a goal, a _code_ now. She takes from him his cards and a piece of fabric and a burning desire to make things better. 

She doesn’t need language to do that. She doesn’t have to say how much she’s hurting in words, just in action. And when she punches Lorenzo in the throat she knows she’s been heard.

Nott speaks Halfling more than Goblin ( _Ghukliak_ , Beau manages to press out of her), but both languages fall from her mouth enough that it piques Beau’s interest. Her first conversation with Nott is the first time she bothers using her rigid Halfling in years. It feels far too gentle for either of them. 

From Nott she learns how tragedy ravages a person, she learns the fondness for family and hearth and home that she saw in the halflings back home, and she learns what a mother’s love looks like. 

After a time, Nott lets her learn what it feels like, too.

Fjord wears the skin of someone uncommon trying to be common, but Beau knows he speaks Orcish because she sees him read a sign in it in Zadash. He rejects that side of him. He speaks Common, but his voice is a lie—another shroud—adopted from someone in the same way Beau tries to adopt Fjord’s soft patience.

From Fjord she learns how to smile without teeth, how to apologize, how to mediate, and how to wait. She waits, on the steps to the Plank King’s chambers, fists clenched and heart a staccato drum. She waits. She’s learned.

Caduceus is a wild card. He enters their group late, but he settles over their tumultuous chaos like a well-fitting glove. He speaks to plants. That’s not a language Beau thinks she can learn, but it’s one she likes to watch.

From Caduceus she learns what it means to be faithful, she learns how to brew tea, and she learns what it means to put trust in something wholly and be trusted wholly in return. It is a feeling more foreign to Beau than any language Caduceus could speak.

Yasha? Yasha sings. North of Zadash, holy music spills from her lips and it catches Beau’s breath in her throat. She so desperately wants to hear it again, but Yasha is so soft and quiet and absent that Beau’s not sure she ever will. She’s not sure she’d deserve it if she did.

From Yasha she learns the true meaning of divine anger, she learns how to show empathy, and she learns, maybe, what it might be like to fall in love again. _I see you_ , says Yasha, and those words are in Common but they don’t feel like it. They feel like so much more. 

Beau’s companions are windows, ones her Empire upbringing and Common tongue hadn’t let her see through. She gets a glimpse into a softness and experience and colour the Empire forbids. From them she cobbles a language—not of words but of _action_ and _feeling_ and _intent_. 

Because Beau’s not good at speaking. She can say so much more with what she does than what she says. In laughter, friendly punches to shoulders, hands willing to help make tea and pick flowers, and an ear willing to listen. 

In waiting, in staying, in a smile without teeth. 

Common is an imposed language—an expectation forced on the world at large. That makes Beau feel a little guilty; that she should have it so easy while others have to bend over backwards to speak her tongue and talk to her. Why is she so special? 

Her culture is a steamroller—the Empire is a consuming force that has dominated a continent and retained almost nothing of its conquests’ former traditions. Her culture is boring and plain and selfish.

She is of the Empire. 

She supposes that’s why it’s ironic that it’s Caleb, out of them all, that she learns the most from. It’s Caleb, the Empire’s son, that makes a teacher of _her_. 

Caleb Widogast is Zemnian. He’s part of a human ethnic group made up of a striking dichotomy of hardy northern farmers and Rexxentrum hacks and if his coppery hair, blue eyes and pale as shit complexion didn’t give that away, his accent surely would.

Because Caleb _speaks_ Zemnian, and when Beau says he speaks Zemnian she _means_ it. Jester speaks Infernal and Nott speaks Halfling but they don’t let it roll off their tongue so easily, it doesn’t flavour their accents like it does with Caleb.

“Caleb,” he lies. “Caleb Widogast.”

The first thing she hears from him is a lie, and that’s okay, because she won’t know it’s a lie until he matters to her and when he matters to her she won’t mind. 

His voice is strongly accented; the “W” in his alias curled into the _softest possible “V”._ When he speaks to them in Common it’s purposeful, every syllable enunciated like every word is fragile. It takes Beau a little while to realise he’s doing that at least partly because it’s an _effort_ for him to speak Common. 

Common has always been a window closer. Beau’s common tongue is met with common tongue, no one ever disregards that. But Caleb has apparently answered his own untrained grasp on Beau’s language with a resolve to subject her to his own. _Constantly._

She does not like Caleb Widogast. This, in an odd way, is the start of her path to liking him.

She does not like him so she pushes him, asks him why he’s scared of fire because she’s smart—intelligent, even—and her stupid, curious self wants to know why he is the way he is. 

She doesn’t expect him to speak. But he does.

Caleb speaks, with his fists balled in the rough fabric of his coat and ancient emotion casting shadows over his voice. He says more than she’s maybe ever heard him say in the entire time she’s known him, and when he’s done—when he’s confessed his deepest shame to her—she wants to beat her stupid Empire to the ground.

There’s nothing she can possibly say in her common tongue to tell Caleb he’s wrong, that he’s a dick but that doesn’t make him a monster. That’s the problem with language, Beau thinks, it can only _say_ , not show.

Beau doesn’t need language. 

Caleb presents Beau with his darkest secret and dares her to kill him with it. Beau decides not to. The next time there’s an opening, she keeps her mouth shut. She keeps his secret. She takes him to the library. She doesn’t speak to him about his parents again. 

Her actions speak for her, in a way he’ll surely be able to understand. _I won’t betray you,_ says her silence. _I’m here for you_ , says her hand on his shoulder. _I don’t_ really _hate you,_ says her head on his shoulder after a battle. 

From Caleb she learns how the lines of guilt run through every part of a person’s frame, she learns how to give amnesty and keep a secret, and she learns—maybe most importantly—what it feels like to have a brother. 

What it feels like to be there for someone. To _teach_ and _care._

“Beauregard?”

Caleb whispers her full name and Beau wonders, not for the first time, why she lets him do that.

“What?” She replies brusquely. They’re in the middle of a planning meeting with Avantika and her inner circle, and while Fjord is leading the charge at the moment she’s supposed to be first mate; She needs to pay attention.

Sharp blue eyes meet hers, and there’s an embarrassment in them she’s never seen before that throws her.

“I, uh, I did not catch what she said,” he whispers. And _Gods_ he looks so uncomfortable. “Avantika, I mean. Her accent is very hard to understand.”

Beau almost wants to say something smarmy at that. _Says the born and bred Zemnian._ That’s mean though. That’s Old Beau.

New Beau sees the nerves and embarrassment bubbling at Caleb’s surface and doesn’t hesitate. She repeats what Avantika said, matching Caleb’s volume but making sure she’s speaking clearly.

And when she’s done: “ _Danke,_ Beauregard.” 

“No problem,” she says, her own eagerness to help surprising her a little.

“You are…” He can’t think of the right word, and gestures to his own mouth. “The way you speak is easy to understand. So thank you.”

Beau stares up at her ceiling that night and lets his last statement play through her mind. 

She had always felt guilty about speaking Common. It is a language that asks others to learn it. She doesn’t have to put another language on the back burner in favour of another to find a place in her country. 

But maybe it could be something else. 

She couldn’t change the system, but maybe she could make it easier. She could make that head of hers useful, here, now. 

So, she gives Caleb words. She is a woman of action.

_Hegemony, Atavistic, Epistemically._

He seeks her out when there is a word he does not understand in a book. He stops her when she says something he doesn’t understand. She walks him through it. 

_Deciduous, Infinitesimal, Pyrrhic._

He asks her, in hushed tones, to repeat the words of more strongly accented folks when he can’t keep up. He says she’s easy to understand—easier than the Plank King and Orly and The Bright Queen and Essek—and she uses that like she would any asset. 

_Cacophony, Retrograde, Anticlinal._

She gives. She does not take.

She tells Fjord about the letter.

“I have a brother,” she says. It is a fact. 

“You have a _brother_ ,” he says. When he says it it’s more than a fact, it’s like a prayer. 

The word tumbles from Fjord’s lips with reverence. He doesn’t have a family so he holds this word like something holy and reverent, as untouchable as a God.

Beau does not find the same meaning in the word. The boy who lives in her old room at her old house is not a _Brother_ to her in the way Fjord means. Fjord means _Love_ and _Responsibility_ and _Family._

When she thinks of Fjord’s meaning, all the baggage and connection he pours into it… Her thoughts do not go to the winery.

She has given many words to Caleb, but _Brother_ is one she gives to him quietly, without him knowing. 

He finds her much later on the Xhorhaus balcony, trying and failing to meditate. 

“ _Hallo,_ Beauregard.”

She grunts, and he sits down next to her. He’s not wearing his jacket—that dumb, Zemnian cold-resistance—and it’s because of his lack of layers that she notices the package he has tucked under his arm.

She’s about to ask what it is when he speaks, drawing her attention to himself instead.

“Why do you bother teaching me Common?” 

Okay. That’s not where she thought he was going.

“Your Common is fine,” she says, reflexively. 

“It is not, but thank you.” He exhales, sending a little puff of fog into the air. “Really, though, it must be quite a chore to repeat things to me like I am a child.”

Beau almost growls. She cares about this motherfucker but his self-deprecation is _debilitating_. Instead of growling, though, she answers him. This surprises them both.

“I feel like all I’m doing when I speak Common is just being another face in a long line of people who have imposed their language on others and given nothing in return.That’s its legacy, you know? Your people are, like, _from_ the Empire, man! And you still have to speak Common even though you struggle with it because it’s _expected_.”

She can’t see him super well in the dark, but his eyes shine in the ambient light of their tree and she knows he’s watching her intently. 

“That’s not fair on you,” she affirms. “The Empire is your home, too, you shouldn’t have to break your neck to be understood there.”

He is quiet for a moment.

“That is… gracious of you.”

They sit in silence for a while longer, watching the perpetual stars turn and turn and turn. 

It’s Caleb that breaks the silence. “You know…” he says. “If we did not share a common tongue we would not be together. None of us.” He nods his head back to the house. “Common connects us, _ja_?”

Beau sighs. “I know. It just… _demands…_ you know? And you guys are all so different and unique and I’m just…”

 _Common_. 

She doesn’t finish her sentence. She starts a new one. “The Empire… it crushes that difference… it crushes diversity.”

“That is true,” he says. “But you do not. I do not know many people so ready to _give_ as you, Beauregard.”

Beau wonders what she did in a past life to deserve these people, because she definitely hasn’t done anything in this one to warrant knowing people like the Nein.

“You have helped me more than you know,” he continues. “More than just understanding your language. I wanted to repay you a little.”

He holds out the package, now. It’s thin and wrapped in brown paper. Beau knows it’s a book before she tears it open.

It’s a book, but not the kind she was expecting. It’s modest and small, bound in green vellum with a faded gold ribbon for a bookmark. It’s thin and wide, and Beau flicks through the first few pages, discovering large, easy-to-read text. Or it would be, if it were in Common.

“This is Zemnian,” she says. Caleb nods.

She flips back to the front cover. It’s the most expensive part of the book—embossed with fine (if sparse) gold detail to form a picture of a cat dancing with a mouse, surrounded by intricate little briars. _Katze und Maus in Gessellschaft,_ says the title. She can sort of guess what some of that means. 

“Is this a children’s book?” She asks.

“ _Ja,_ ” Caleb says. “I found it behind that bookstore in Nicodranas.”

“In the garbage?” Beau laughs. There’s no venom in it.

“I was mending it. In my spare time.” His voice gets an edge, like what he’s saying is hard. “It was part of a collection I read was I was younger. To help me learn to read.” 

Beau runs a hand over the cover, now aware of the bumps and seams making up the scars of the _Mending_ spell. 

“I do not have many people to speak my language with anymore,” Caleb says softly. “I would be happy to return the favour you have done for me. Only if you wish, of course.”

Beau tears her eyes away from the cover, meeting Caleb’s hesitant stare. His meaning takes a moment to click into place, but when it does her eyes widen.

“You want to teach me Zemnian?” She squawks. A bird roosting above them alights in panic. 

Caleb nods nervously. “You teach _me_ Common. And you are more than smart enough to pick up a fifth language. That’s not a joke.”

Beau stares back down at the book, and suddenly it seems far heavier in her hands—far more valuable. 

And for the first time in her life, Beau thinks she might be alright with the idea of being _taught._

“That sounds…” she exhales. Long and thoughtful. “ _Damn,_ Caleb. I’d love to.” 

“Really?”

“Yeah!” 

He looks shocked, like he hadn’t expected her to agree. “It will be a lot of work. We would have to start with the basics—" he gestures to the children’s book “—and work up from there.” 

“I’m pretty good with languages,” Beau says. “Besides, I already know, like, _all_ the swear words.” 

This pulls a laugh from him. “Well then I guess I don’t need to teach you after all.”

She can’t see him smile, it’s a little too dark and his smiles are often too small, but she thinks he might be. 

“ _Danke_ , Caleb.”

She doesn’t miss his sharp inhale, followed by a soft laugh, deep in his chest. She smiles without teeth.

“ _Bitte._ You are a good egg, Beauregard.”

“You too,” she says, laying her hand on his shoulder. She always worked better with action. The hand on the shoulder says more that she could ever say with words.

It’s... nice.

And maybe that stands out to Beau because she has never been nice on her own. It’s not her native language, but she picks it up.

She’s always been good at that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Beau voice* I failed my English final so now my new first language is Acts of Service.
> 
> Common isn’t really a fantasy language, so I drew from my own experiences as a native English speaker when writing Beau’s interaction with Caleb. Anyone else get English Guilt? 
> 
> Some notes on cultural stuff: The book Caleb gives Beau, Katze und Maus in Gessellschaft, is a real story from the original Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales. It's a weird fable in which a cat and mouse become roommates and the cat eventually eats the mouse, ending the story by Office-Staring at the camera and going "This is just how the world works, kids". Jacob and Wilhelm really snapped with that one.


	4. Zemnian

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Caleb pieces himself back together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland — and no other.”  
> — Emil Cioran
> 
> Just a general content warning for Caleb Stuff, i.e. mild suicidal ideation and being a professional sad boy that consumes all joy within 10ft.

Common is not Bren’s first language. It does not come easily to him. He does not want it.

Many things come easily to him; the motions of magic, the positions of the stars and the sun, the names and faces of strangers...

Duty, for a time.

But Common? With its nonsense structure and alien phonetics? Common is not so simple.

He does not need it. He does not want it. He is Zemnian, from the fields, and his language is his own. They say there is a Zemnian word for everything, and if there is not one that they _make_ one. When Bren is young he wonders why anyone would possibly need anything else. 

Zemnian is home. 

_Blumenthal_ means _Flower_ _Valley_ and is called such because farmers care more about the truth than being creative. At least that’s what Leofric tells his son. 

Bren Aldric Ermendrud does not leave his valley of flowers for a very long time, and though he reads of the outside world in the piecemeal books he scrounges from family and neighbours and the occasional merchant, the outside world rarely comes to him. 

So he speaks Zemnian. He _is_ Zemnian, after all.

He speaks to his parents, his teachers, his friends and anyone else who will listen. To his Oma and Opa who live on the hill and his Tante Johanna who lives by the river. He even speaks to his Omi Roth, who his mother doesn’t talk to anymore but he likes very much. 

Bren is smart and the town knows it. He can remember uncanny things, read a mile a minute and always knows north.

He can do _magic_.

(“ _Wunderkind_!” Shouts his Onkel Hans, who always smells of wine and mutton, “ _ein_ _kleine_ _Zauberer!”_

Bren doesn’t know why his father rolls his eyes.)

Una and Leofric begin teaching him Common when he is ten. He can do magic, which he is happy about, so he will be going to school, which he is ecstatic about, which means learning Common. 

He’s not so happy about that.

_“Ich möchte kein Kommon lernen, Omi,”_ he says, hands twitching in his lap and a frown pulling at his features.

Omi Roth, his mother’s mother, peers at him across the table through her magnificently round glasses and clicks her tongue. She takes a sip of tea.

 _“Why not, Schatz?”_ She asks. _“You are so very smart, you know.”_

 _“But you don’t have to speak Common,”_ he says, hyper aware of the fact he’s whining now. _“No one here uses it.”_

Omi Roth sighs, and Bren watches her closely. Her hair had been red before it was white, and now it tinges pink in the afternoon sun. She shakes her head, jostling the little clay beads on her necklaces. 

_“I am a farmer’s wife, Bren,”_ she says. _“I have never left Zemni. You, however…”_

She leans forward, poking a single, wrinkled finger into his chest. 

_“You are much too big for this little place. You will do great things one day and for that you will need to leave. To survive the world and speak to all its people.”_

He blinks at her, she pushes her finger a little harder into his sternum.

 _“Verstehen?”_ She snaps, not unkindly _. “Ja?”_

 _“Ja.”_ He’s still whining but he’s not lying; he understands. 

She nods and gives him a playful swat to the back of the head. 

_“Gut,”_ she smiles and takes another sip of tea. _“Now get going before Una thinks I’ve kidnapped you.”_

(Omi Roth passes in the winter and the town has to wait until the spring thaw to bury her next to her husband. She dies before her daughter does and while Bren will not care about that small detail, Caleb will look back on it as a mercy.)

The hardwood floors of Ikithon’s country house creak like Bren’s Opa’s bones, but he knows the safe places to rest his feet. 

He has an eidetic memory, or something like it, and he’s been memorising the weak points in the floor for this exact moment. 

Astrid clasps his hand in hers. He wraps his other gently around her waist, and she lets her free hand lie on his shoulder. She’s picking at the loose threads in his shoulder seam, but he doesn’t mind. 

“You know I am only letting you lead because you know where to step, right?” She whispers, a crooked smile on her lips. 

“ _Ja_ ,” he whispers back, rolling his eyes. “Of course.” 

She squeezes his fingers a little too tightly. “ _Arschloch._ ” 

Muffled music from Trent’s room seeps through the walls and ceiling. They can’t be sure what he’s doing, playing Irudel Syllaria’s Waltz No. 2 in C-Major Op.115 at ten at night, but they’re not going to pass up the entertainment. 

The music swells and the two begin to dance.

Bren remembers the way, guiding himself and Astrid onto the sturdy parts of the boards so the steps and spins of the waltz don’t make a sound. They dance in complete silence, to muffled music, but the moment reverberates like chimes in Bren’s bones.

The song ends and they pull together; chest to chest, hips to hips, faces close enough to feel each other’s hot breath. She’s standing on his toes but he doesn’t care.

“ _Ich_ _liebe dich,_ ” he says softly, and it’s the first time he’s meant it.

 _“Ich liebe dich auch,”_ she says back, and maybe it’s the first time she’s meant it too. And then she kisses him, small and soft but full of so _much._

Zemnian tastes like home on his tongue, it always has, like fresh _Lebkuchen_ and _Wildblumen_ and the hot, hot sun in summer. And now it tastes like Astrid, too.

Zemnian tastes like home. After a while, Bren stops speaking it. They all do, when home betrays them. 

Bren murders his parents in spring, when the wildflowers bloom.

 _It’s good,_ he thinks, raising his hand and watching the skin blacken and crack, _the rain will stop the fire from spreading too far._

Bren murders his parents in spring, when the wildflowers bloom, there will be nothing left to bury when he is done.

He casts his spell.

The wildflowers bloom. 

He shatters. 

Bren Aldric Ermendrud doesn’t speak for eleven years and somewhere along the way he stops being Bren. 

That is okay.

He thinks that might be okay.

When he finally gets his mind and voice back he’s not sure what to do with it. He doesn’t speak. He waits. He escapes. He runs into the night with the clothes on his back, blood on his hands and a stolen necklace slung around his skinny neck. He does this in silence. 

He doesn’t speak for a week. Not until he is forced to wander into a small village and beg for food and coin. 

“ _Bitte_ ,” he breathes to no one, and it’s the first thing he’s said in eleven years. 

His own voice catches him off guard. It’s not the young, strong thing he remembers. It’s deeper and older and tired, laced with the threads of disuse. The last thing of real substance he remembers before the cleric’s cold fingers on his temples is being seventeen and committing the most heinous crime a son could ever commit. Now he is twenty-eight and his body doesn’t fit him right.

He is back to square one, in some ways; time has taken so much. He is out in the world like his Omi had said he would be and now he has to fight to be heard. To survive.

He aches for home. He falls back into it, into the language imprinted on his soul, carved into his bones down to the marrow. His ancestral tongue. The language of his father and his father’s father.

The language of dead men.

Zemnian feels like home but he has no home to return to. All he has is a direction to run.

He starts with a cat.

 _Frumpkin,_ named after a barn cat who had died the year before Soltryce. A piece of home — not excessively large — but a piece nonetheless. 

He holds the cat close to him, in the cold and rain. _“Hallo, meine katze,”_ He croaks softly, stroking its head like the fucking crazy person he is. _“Ich werde dich Frumpkin nennen, ja?”_

The familiar meows contentedly. He takes the name in his master’s language, and gives him his mother tongue in return. 

Then, he’s thirty-two and sitting in a jail cell. A pair of glowing yellow eyes waits for his answer.

“I’m Nott the Brave,” the toothy mouth below the eyes had said. “What’s your name?”

It takes him a few seconds to answer, partly because he needs to come up with a convincing lie, and partly because this goblin speaks _very_ quickly.

Common is not his first language. Her muddled, gravelly words sort themselves out in his head with painstaking slowness.

_Wie ist dein Name?_

_Mein Name ist… mein Name ist..._

“My name is Caleb,” he lies.

He doesn’t know why he picks Caleb, in the end. He doesn’t know that it means _Faithful_ and _Loyal_. He just knows that Bren means _Burning_ and _Fire_ and he wants to be anything but that. Anything. 

He’s sitting in a jail cell, and the man-who-is-not-Bren becomes Caleb Widogast.

Caleb likes Nott the Brave. She is quick and clever and bright and doesn’t ask questions. 

Not hard ones, at least.

“Okay, now, how d’you say crossbow?”

“ _Armbrust_ _,”_ he replies, the word coming so much easier than the Common equivalent would. 

From her perch on Caleb’s shoulders Nott is thrown into a fit of laughter. She giggles rather than cackles, which is oddly dainty of her. He likes it inexplicably.

“That’s so much more _tough_ sounding,” she exclaims, and then she hoists up her own crossbow and aims it at the path in front of them. “ _Armbrust_ _,”_ she croons.

Her accent his terrible but Caleb cracks a grin Nott cannot see.

Zemnian is like home. It’s dark rye bread and bluebirds and his father’s cider. But home is starting to feel like Nott, too.

They call themselves the Mighty Nein and there’s something about that that makes him happy and scared in a nebulous, immeasurable way. 

It’s _his_ language.

He doesn’t want to be noticed, he doesn’t want a reputation, but it’s his _language._ It’s a little piece of home. 

Zemnian is home. It’s white winter solstices and his mother’s cooking and gingerbread left in your shoes on holidays. But home is also starting to feel like the Mighty Nein.

Home begins to feel like Nott, curled at his feet; Beau, hand on his shoulder; Yasha, steady blade on his jaw; Fjord, hand clasped in his; Jester, leading their dance; Molly; shining; Caduceus; consoling.

And that terrifies Caleb more than anything.

He loses it, a bit, in Shady Creek Run. 

Ophelia Mardun comes waltzing down her manor’s staircase and greets them in a rich Zemnian accent that reminds Caleb of his mother with all the force of a physical slap to the face.

Una Ermendrud was not as beautiful as Ophelia Mardun. Una had wiry red hair and rosacea on her cheeks and the calloused fingers of a working woman. But she’d had the same deep voice as Ophelia. She’d had the same hard, strong accent that could somehow turn a word like _Backpfeifengesicht_ into something palatable.

“Some of us have not been so far south,” she says. "I can tell."

Her words cut into him like knives and it takes all his willpower not to lose it, right then and there in her gaudy, decadent foyer.

He had always been aware that his accent was softer now than it had been; five years of steadily avoiding the north of the Empire would do that to anyone. But he had never had to truly think about it. 

It’s stupid. It’s so stupid to be thrown by such a thing, but he is anyway. 

But isn’t that just like him? He’s losing his language through disuse like he lost his parents through his weakness and his mind through failure of his own. This is his fault, once again.

 _I can tell,_ she says. _Ich kann sagen._ He’s lost the threads of the north that used to run through his speech like twine. They’ve been cut loose and what is he now?

But he doesn’t say any of that. What he says is:

“No. I appreciate hearing the old tongue again.”

 _"Well,”_ Ophelia smirks. _“Stick around.”_

He doesn’t want to _stick_ _around_ , he wants to go home. But he doesn’t have a home. He just has a direction to run.

He gets it back, a bit, in Felderwin, and he thinks for the first time in a long time that maybe he doesn’t want it. 

“My name was Bren Aldric Ermendrud,” he says. 

He’s careful about how he says it — the pronunciation, the tense — he needs them to understand and his Common is not as good as it could be. He needs them to understand, he needs _Veth_ to understand. 

(And _mein Gott_ is that harder to say than _Nott._ _Veth_ , all soft and quiet, the one thing Zemnian isn’t. He’ll try, though, he’ll do it for her.)

“Do you want us to call you Bren?” they ask. He does not.

Bren is Zemnian and Zemnian is home but _Bren_ means _Burning_ and _Fire_ and he doesn’t want to be that. Caleb is a Common name, but it belongs to the Nein, to Nott, to _him._

He’s sitting at a table in the inn, after it all. The others are out, investigating. He hasn’t spoken to Nott. Fresh dirt is dry and scratchy on his face.

He wishes he would shatter again, but his mind is too whole. The cleric saw to that; she gave him him mind but she didn’t remove what had taken it in the first place.

He _remains._

“Bren,” a woman says, her tone unsure.

His guts twist and his arms burn, they bleed, they rip and tear and he is _screaming for the mother he will burn_ and–

He squeezes his eyes shut.

“ _Nein_ ,” he almost gasps. “Caleb, please.” It’s like begging.

A pair of hands, large and pale, reach out to clasp his own shaking ones.

“I’m sorry,” Yasha says. He looks up — not making eye contact, but staring at the tattoo on her chin. Her hands squeeze his.

Her hands are gentle. He knows this; he has been on the other end of her blade before. 

The irony of their early morning shaving ritual all those months ago had not been lost on either of them. Magician’s Judge, a sword designed to kill mages, had been used to do something as benign as shave one’s face. Nott had joked that the enchanters would be rolling in their graves.

Caleb wonders what would have happened if Yasha had slipped. Would his shield have sprung to save him? Or would the sword have dispelled that on its own? Caleb wonders…

“Do you miss your home?” He asks, he doesn’t know why. 

He knows very little of Yasha’s story. He knows she has a sadness in her, like he does, but he’s not sure of its cause yet. He’s not sure where she gets her rage. 

“No,” says Yasha simply. That’s that on that. “Do you miss yours?” 

“Very much,” he breathes, and it feels good to say it. 

“Tell me about it.”

And for some reason, he does. 

He tells her about the river he would play in when he was young, catching frogs and letting them go in his mother’s garden. He tells her about helping his father and uncles on the farms, learning how to milk goats and find wild chicken eggs. He tells her about his Omi Roth, with her eclectic taste in jewellery and shaky relationship with her daughter. He doesn’t talk about his parents much, and if Yasha notices his she doesn’t say anything. 

He tells her about the flowers last.

“It is beautiful in the spring. There are wildflowers that bloom in the fields around the village. That is why we call it Blumenthal, you know? _Blumen—_ it means flowers.”

“ _Blumen,_ ” Yasha says, and Caleb is surprised by how well she pronounces it. “I think I would like it.” 

They fall into an easy silence, which is something Caleb likes about talking with Yasha. 

“Our homes are part of us in different ways,” Yasha says. “Not all good.”

When he doesn’t say anything she continues.

“For me, I see home in my flowers. For you, it’s your language, I think.” She brushes a hand up to his arms, hastily re-wrapped so as to still show the slivers of faded scars. “And it’s your guilt.” 

Caleb doesn’t know why he doesn’t flinch. It has been a long time since he has let someone other than Nott touch him like this. 

“I think you let shame rule you, a little,” she says, and when he moves to protest she puts up a hand. He stills.

“I know what that’s like, Caleb, believe me,” she says. “You cannot… you cannot get rid of it completely, you can only learn to live with it.” 

He can’t find the words, in any language.

“I do not want… that is not…” 

Zemnian is _home._

Does he speak it because he’s guilty? Does he cling to it so hard because it’s the only part of himself he didn’t reduce to ashes? The only part of him that is his mother and his father and his grandparents and his town and… _die Heimat._

_“Guilt drowns and guilt burns.”_

Caleb’s eyes snap to Yasha’s as the harmonic tones of Celestial float unbidden from her tongue.

He has only heard it from her once, when he drew it from her in the forest north of Zadash. He had expected to hear it again, eventually, but not now. Regardless, the divine words slip into an easy translation in his head.

“ _Was…?”_

She is impassive, like stone. “Do you know what that means?”

“No,” he says, _but it sounds morbidly appropriate for the circumstances_ , he thinks _._

Yasha gives a wan smile. “It means some guilt drags you down and some guilt fuels you, drives you to do good. What do you think?”

Caleb wonders how one woman could be this perceptive, even accidentally. He stares at her for a very very long time, and she stares back. He is quite sure in this moment that he is more similar to Yasha that he had previously thought.

“I think I know what you mean.” 

And then she says “Do you really?” and it’s like getting punched. 

He opens his mouth like a gaping fish, his face pulling into an unconscious scowl. He wants to say of course he does, that’s all he’s been trying to do for five fucking years, but there’s something in Yasha’s sad smile that stops him.

“Sometimes the things we think are good just hurt more.” She says solemnly, and Caleb gets a sudden sense that she’s talking about more than just him. “You can’t withdraw into yourself when people need you. You shouldn’t take on blame that isn’t yours to take.” 

There’s a Zemnian word for that, he thinks absently, because of course there is. 

_Verschlimmbesserung._ To improve things for the worse. 

“There are things about me you do not know,” he says, finding his voice. The things she’s saying are resonating but she doesn’t know the details. She doesn’t know how precisely her words are hitting him.

“And there are things I do,” she retorts easily.

They fall into another silence, less easy than the last.

“Go talk to Nott, Caleb,” Yasha says, getting to her feet and releasing his hands. They feel colder now. “She needs someone right now.”

There’s something veiled there that Caleb can’t quite unpack. But he heeds her advice. He goes upstairs to where Nott is, alone, like him.

He goes home.

Or, at the very least, to something that’s starting to feel like it.

Dairon tells him his accent is too strong, that he will be noticed. He is pleased, even when he lies and tells them it’s fake. 

He calls his moorbounder Jannick, his commands are in Zemnian.

 _Vollstrecker._ Executioner. An almost-assassin. He tells the queen what he knows (what he was).

The guards at Baxxozan stop him. Be careful with that accent, they say. He half-wants Ophelia to see this, to try and call him a Southerner now.

Yasha leaves.

The Dynasty catch a Scourger.

The Dynasty catch a Zemnian. 

Caleb presses his face up to the bars of their tiny cell like a child at a carnival, with none of the joy. His mind is spinning with desperation, with misguided _hope_ that this is _her._

What comes from him is his mother tongue. The one that tastes of autumn and Astrid.

 _“Wake up,”_ he says. The woman twitches. He doesn’t have to struggle to be understood anymore.

And for the first time in years he doesn’t just _think_ clearly in his language, he _speaks_ in it too. At length. And it comes so easily.

Zemnian is Caleb’s first language. The language of his parents and his parent’s parents…

 _“Welcome back, Bren,”_ the stranger says. She is not Astrid.

The name is sour. It is not his.

He pulls away and he moves. As he does he sees the Nein, Fjord with his sword drawn, Nott with her crossbow poking low out of her cloak, Caduceus and Beau, gripping their respective staffs. _Oh,_ he thinks, _they were ready to break her out for me._ He doesn’t quite know what to think of that.

Jester runs up to the bars when he vacates the space. She wants to see if it’s Astrid, make sure — like Caleb had. 

It’s not her.

But that’s okay.

Astrid hasn’t been his home for a very long time.

Caleb is sitting in his room, the other book sprawled across his lap. He’s not writing — just reading. 

He wishes, for selfish reasons, that Yasha would come back. He wants to ask her for advice, and it’s only now that she’s not here that he realises how little he turned to her before. He wants to tell her she was right, mostly.

He wants to tell her that his guilt is not gone but he’s found a better home for it, that his guilt is _burning,_ not _drowning._ He wants to tell her how much that scares him. 

Beau ducks her head around the door jamb

“We reading this thing or what?” She barks, holding the children’s book he’s gifted her up in the air. 

“Have you finished page three?” he deadpans.

“Aw man, you know I can’t,” she whines, throwing her head back in faux-anguish. “Plus! The next page has a cat with a bow tie on it. Admit that’s cooler than a mouse in a hat.” 

She holds it up and it _is_ cooler, but he won’t say that.

“Finish the page you are on,” he says, and then he adds: _”Verstehen?”_

“ _Jaaaaa,_ ” she drawls, and slinks back into the hall. 

Caleb turns back to his book, tracing his own scratchy handwriting with his finger.

Zemnian feels like home. Like the Ermendrud house in spring, like the wind through oak trees, like northern constellations and _magic._

But home feels different in some ways. 

Home feels like whiskey and a hand in his, like the sea and blood, like stale sugar and paint, like the sky before a storm, like light through leaves. Like Beau, trying to pronounce _Hasenpfeffer_ for ten minutes straight.

Bren shattered and Caleb is something else, put back together from Bren’s broken pieces and a mixture of something entirely new to fill what’s gone forever.

And that’s okay.

He thinks that might be okay. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Obligatory apology to real life German people for doing this to your truly very lovely language. It’s about the flavour, y’know?.
> 
> Liam: The only family of Caleb's I’ve mentioned by name are his parents.  
> Me, about to create 24 distinct extended family members: It’s free real estate.
> 
> some notes on german: The early comment about Zemnians "making" words is true! The German language is weirdly adept at constructing really long compound words for hyper-specific concepts. This process, called Wortbildung, is to blame for words like Freundschaftsbezeugung and Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften, which are both real and awful to try and say!


	5. Celestial

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Yasha defines divinity.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.”   
> — 1 Corinthians 13:1, NIV.

For as long as Yasha has known, she has been able to sing the songs of heaven.

It is a unique thing, to know a language innately. She’s pretty sure it’s not normal. Then again, giant skeletal wings that emerge from one’s back are not normal, so maybe this is par for the course.

Celestial, they call it, and it’s both the name of the language and the name of those who speak it. Yasha supposes that includes her, even though she doesn’t feel very divine.

She grows up in the moorlands; the marsh and heath of southern Xhorhas, where it rains all year and the horizon blends the grey ground into the grey skies. When she can carry a sword she is given one, and when she can hunt she is sent out on expeditions with the older hunters.

Yasha grows up in the mud, the rain, the cold, and the hunt. She is spilled blood and broken bone, teeth tearing into barely-cooked spider-flesh, and hands gripped around the hilt of her blade.

She is not divine. Not until Zuala.

“They call you Orphanmaker,” says the huntress. “They call me Snowpiercer.”

They’re scouting for an upcoming hunt, hunkered down together in the low brush of the moorlands. Yasha has never been gifted in the skills of a ranger, but the Snowpiercer has a reputation for being an excellent one. They say she can track a beast by scent alone, they say she can shoot straight through the eye of a moving deer from one hundred paces.

“You may call me Zuala, though,” she says, and when she smiles it’s all over.

Because the Snowpiercer - Zuala - is the sun, or something like it at least.

She has hair like honey and eyes that glimmer like a sunlit riverbed. From her place on the ground, belly to the mud and pigment camouflaging her face the colours of the low scrub around her, she throws Yasha the most beautiful smile she has ever seen.

“Y-Yasha…” says Yasha. “You may call me Yasha.”

They are not kind in the Dolorov tribe, but they are just. Law and tradition is important; it is what separates them from the beasts they hunt.

To be married is to be joined forever.

Yasha and Zuala are married in the fall.

“Sing to me, won’t you?” Zuala says, holding Yasha’s hand tight in her own. And _Gods_ , Yasha would pull the stars from the sky if she’d only ask.

Celestial is not spoken in the traditional way. Its words flow into each other in such a way that to say them on their own is to lose their magic. It is only through connecting them into sentences and statements and song, that their full meaning comes together. The tones and pitch of the words is just as important as their pronunciation, their harmonies and melodies as integral to the meaning as grammar and syntax.

In the language Yasha has known since birth, she sings songs of love and dedication and heaven to Zuala. Only to Zuala.

“You are an angel, my love,” Zuala says, kissing her on the bridge of her nose. Her lips are chapped from the unforgiving winds of the wildlands but still the softest thing Yasha could ever imagine feeling. “Do you know how I know?”

“How?” She breathes, knowing she’ll be struck senseless regardless of what words come next.

“Because you love,” her wife (Her wife! Her wife!) replies. “You love me, and you love the world, and that’s what angels do.”

They are married in the fall and found out in the winter.

Yasha runs before she can see the deed done. The part of her that loves violently wants to stay, to rip the throats from those who would dare to darken her sky and die trying. But the part of her that loves softly, the part of her that is weak, does not want to remember Zuala for her death. She wants to remember the way the sun shone in her hair like honey, and the way her freckles bunched when she laughed.

And she does not want to die.

So, she runs and runs and loses herself completely - for how long she is not certain. Eventually she finds a God, or perhaps a God finds her, and she learns how to turn the burning, corroding rage that is boiling beneath her breast outward.

She moves west across the mountains, no longer loving much of anything, thinking Zuala was wrong, that she is no angel for she no longer loves the world or herself.

Yasha is not divine. She is a coward and a killer and a fool.

Mollymauk Tealeaf is the moon, or something like it at least.

She joins the circus for safety and anonymity, hoping to get lost in the lights and colour of it all. What she doesn’t expect to find is a piece of herself she hadn’t known was missing.

“That’s Mollymauk,” Gustav says. “He was the newest before you.”

The tiefling is sitting on a log, wrapped up in a heavy jacket and a blanket, draped over his knees. He’s talking to a little dwarven girl, the two of them having an inaudible but amiable looking conversation over steaming bowls of soup.

Gustav gives her the rest of the tour then leaves her to her devices. When she returns to the central camp, Mollymauk is alone by the fire. The something in her tugs her closer, and before she can stop herself, she’s right next to him.

“Like the bird?” She asks bluntly.

“I’m sorry?” His voice rings like the little baubles in his horns. His eyes are red like blood.

“Your name. Mollymauk. Like the bird, right?” Yasha realises this conversation is going on far too long and far too awkwardly for her to keep towering over the poor fellow, so she sits down next to him.

He’s not that much shorter than her, but he’s incredibly slim. His skin is a deep lavender, and his berry-coloured hair curls around his horns to the nape of his neck. His neck, Yasha notices, is adorned with tattoos of all colours. He is so vibrant, even in the dim firelight - she wonders how she must look next to him, as pale and dark as she is.

“I wouldn’t know,” he says with a smile. “Bo gave me a list of “M” names and I picked the one I liked. You can call me Molly, though.”

He holds out his hand and she takes it.

“Where are you from, big lady?” he asks.

“Xhorhas,” she replies. She doesn’t want to lie.

He grins, toothy and sharp. “I have no idea where that is.”

“That is okay,” she says. “It is not very nice.”

He pauses, biting his lips for a second, and then continues. “What’s a mollymawk?”

“It is a sea-bird,” Yasha says. “I never saw them much, but sometimes they would get lost and fly inland to my home. They are very big, and, uh-” she holds her index fingers up to her eyebrows and tilts them in, feigning a scowl “-they look very angry all the time.”

Molly laughs. The sound is almost musical.

“What’s your name, big lady?” he asks. “Otherwise I’m gonna have to keep calling you big lady.”

_Orphanmaker. Orphanmaker._

“I am Yasha.”

“Okay, and who is this one?”

She runs her hands as gently as she had over the symbols on his coat, feeling the fine embroidery against her calloused fingers.

“The Moonweaver. She’s the goddess of secret trysts,” says Molly with a sly grin, thumbing through his cards. They’re new now, not bearing the feathered edges of wear and experience they will in time.

“Appropriate,” she smirks.

Molly laughs. The bells in his horns jingle. “For you, too,” he says.

Yasha shakes her head, smiling sadly. “Maybe once. Not anymore.”

(She had told him about Zuala very early in their friendship, which had surprised her as much as him. But she had felt a connection to Molly, something kindred. She had woken up one morning and decided any falsehood would sour what she had built between the two of them.

She had spoken of Zuala, of her hair like honey and their secret marriage and her death. Molly had listened. He had continued to love her. She had spoken of her wings and her music, and he had not shied away from her.)

Molly’s expression falters at her words, turning into a mask of sadness that doesn’t suit him.

“What happened back then doesn’t make you a bad person, Yasha,” he says. “It didn’t make you a bad person then and it definitely doesn’t now.”

“You cannot say that for certain.”

“Is that why you don’t sing?” he asks. “You told me you could, but I never hear you do it.”

She shrugs.

“Can you sing to me?” He asks. And _Gods_ , Yasha would tear the rivers from their beds if he’d only ask.

But she… she can’t do this. _Coward,_ says a voice in her head.

“I don’t think I deserve to sing, Molly,” she says.

He takes her hands in his. Yasha is stocky where Molly is thin, and his slender, scarred hands look so small wrapped around hers. He leans forward, pressing a kiss to her forehead.

“You deserve the world, Yasha,” he says, and it’s in that moment she realises she’s just found one more person to lose.

Molly is shot on the road outside Deastok. A stray arrow from a group of drunk, pissed off ruffians fits oh-so-cleanly between his bottom ribs and he’s sent to his knees. She screams; that burning, burning rage bursting forth from her like thunder. She loses time, and when she runs over to press her hands on his wound they’re already stained with someone else’s blood.

She reaches deep into herself for the divinity she carries inside and doesn’t deserve. Her hands glow with holy light, and a warm wind caresses her fingers.

“Cheers,” Molly coughs, ripping the arrow free at the same time she closes the wound. “You’re just full of surprises, you know that?”

 _“I don’t want to lose anyone else,”_ she says, the words tumble in Celestial, little twinkling notes, threaded with fine harmonies. Molly’s eyes widen.

“Oh,” he says. “Well, I’m not sure what you said but… uh, thank you. For letting me hear it.”

She nods.

“You’re an angel, Yash,” he says, flashing a weak grin.

“No, I’m not.” Of that she is certain.

“Yes you are. You know how I know?” He reaches up and puts a hand on her chest, over her heart. “You came back for me.”

She only realises she’s started believing him when it’s too late to stop.

The Mighty Nein are, initially, just more people for Yasha to potentially lose. The way Molly latches onto them is endearing, but not a sentiment Yasha shares. She does not open herself up so easily. At least not at first.

The Mighty Nein are not the sun or the moon, they’re not quite anything.

(Perhaps stars, with how often they fall.)

Caleb falls outside of Zadash, shot down beside her as they battle a horde of goblins.

She roars, and her wings burst free and she is terrifying and divine.

Soon after, Caleb is on his feet. He is a star that does not long stay fallen, after all. She is ready to leave it all at that, to move on, to gloss over the questions roiling in her companion’s heads…

But then Caleb speaks her language, and that is something. In the forests north of Zadash she hears her language in the mouth of another for the first time. It is from Caleb of all people, human and unassuming and haunted like her.

 _“No, but really, are you an angel?”_ He asks her, and the musical tones swim with unpractised clumsiness between his teeth. He sings in careful tenor, his voice not quite shedding its accent.

 _“I don’t think so,”_ she says, and her soft voice lilts in harmony with itself and with him. She doesn’t have to think so, she just knows.

“Book-boy speaks Celestial,” Molly whispers later that night. “Isn’t that interesting?”

Yasha nods.

“Do you want to ask him about it?”

“Maybe,” she says. “I’m afraid he does not trust me enough to tell me, though.”

This makes sense to her — a logical conclusion — for Caleb is small and she is so very _large_ and _strong_ and _violent_.

Molly scoffs. “Why not?”

 _Because I am terrifying_ , she wants to say. _Because I am something to be feared._

Beau falls in Labenda, in the grasp of a troll whose skin rots and burns all it touches.

“Are you alright?” Yasha asks later, after it all. She knows better than anyone that scars are not always visible.

“I’m fine, Yasha,” Beau says, and she smiles that smile she makes when Fjord isn’t trying to rein her in. It’s wide and bright and full of teeth. It makes her eyes crinkle at the corners - blue, like the sky in the evening. She says Yasha’s name so softly. Far too softly. Yasha doesn’t quite think she deserves it.

 _“I am glad you are okay,”_ Yasha whispers, the wavering notes of heaven’s tongue slipping out unbidden.

“Wazzat?” Beau says. Yasha only shakes her head. 

“It’s nothing,” she says.

Beau walks away, and Yasha watches her go rejoin the group. They drink and they laugh and Yasha can’t help thinking that maybe this might be something worth loving, after all.

Fjord and Jester fall with her, on their way to Shady Creek Run.

They are jumped in the night by slavers - butchers of men - and Yasha will hate herself forever for being so at ease to be taken by surprise.

That’s what you get for opening your heart, says a nasty little voice in her head that Zuala would hate, you’ve become complacent in your softness, and now you’ve lost everything.

Molly falls outside Shady Creek Run. He does not get up ever again.

Yasha is not there to save him.

She hadn’t been there; only the humans and Nott; their smallest and frailest members. None of them could do a thing in the face of a beast like Lorenzo; Not Beau, not Nott, not Caleb.

Yasha knows that isn’t fair. It had never been anyone’s job to keep Molly alive but hers, and she had failed him, like she had failed Zuala.

She screams. She walks into the forest. She does not shed tears until she is out of sight.

There are no more lights in her sky.

She finds them again, or maybe they find her. She had always come back to them before, but they had always had Molly before now, a beacon that called her home.

So, when she finds them on the coast, she lets herself wonder if this could be destiny. Divine providence.

Molly’s last gift to her; a place to belong. People to love.

So, she stays with them. She stays for Darktow. She stays for the Diver’s Grave.

She stays for six days alone, waiting for them to come back to her from their place in a strange mechanical ball – an odd shift in their dynamic, to be sure, but not one she finds particularly funny.

She tells them about Zuala, about how she loved and lost her. She lets them in.

She stays.

She stays for Felderwin.

Nott talks about her husband and the love and pain is heavy on her trembling words. Yasha wants to hold her, to pull her close because she understands.

But Nott – _Veth_ – is brave. Nott ran to save her family. Yasha ran to save herself.

Selflessness is divine, is it not? In this moment, Nott is more of an angel than Yasha ever could be.

She stays, and that, in its own way, is awful.

They travel to Xhorhas. She did not want to come back, but Nott’s husband is there so how can she say no? She knows what it is to lose a lover, and she will not stand by and let life inflict such a feeling on another.

But in the caves under Assarius the Mighty Nein fall at her hand and she wonders if she should have stayed at all.

She drives her sword into Caleb’s chest, her rage and actions not her own. She almost tears asunder the only person who has ever spoken to her in her own tongue.

Afterwards she is forgiven, and she cannot help but think her companions forgive too easily.

Beneath Bazzoxan, Yasha leaves them. She does not come back for a very long time.

Her actions are not her own. She is a prisoner of mind and soul. She tears the world apart at the behest of a madman, surrounded by demons and killers and monsters, and she doesn’t want this to be where she belongs.

She has a place she belongs – Molly’s last gift to her – people to love and a home to return to. There is laughter and light in a city of perpetual darkness. There are flowers on her bedroom walls.

She tries. She tries to hard to break free. But fate is cruel thing. The world has never loved her.

“Sing to me, Orphanmaker,” says Obann, hand on her chin and hot breath on her lips. He tries to pull the songs of heaven from her, tries to bastardise the hymns of angels by dragging them through her monstrous mouth.

She doesn’t sing for him, eventually he stops trying. This is her small rebellion.

Yasha stalks Exandria like a nightmare, her body not her own, killing and killing and killing. She does not sing. She is not divine.

She returns in a church, lightning tearing itself across the sky, stained glass cutting into her flesh as she falls to her knees.

The Nein turn to her. Yasha is home.

She tears Obann’s wings from his back, relishing in the slick sound of sinew and bone shredding under her deft hands. She is eerily reminded of tearing spiders up to eat.

There is not much time to rest after that. Not for a long time. Hatred roils in Yasha’s stomach, a deep self-inflicted shame she cannot shake, nor wishes to.

It’s not until they’re back in Xhorhas that Yasha lets herself breathe. She stands in front of the flowers on her walls and for the first time in months feels the taste of Celestial on her tongue, cloying, daring her to speak it.

She is interrupted by a knock on her door.

“Come in,” she says softly.

Of all people, Fjord is the one to drift into her room. She is struck by the differences in him, as she had been for all of them. He holds himself in a new way, a more honest way. He’s started growing a beard, too, which is weird.

“Yasha,” he begins in his new voice – his old voice, really, but Yasha finds it all a bit confusing. “Can I speak with you for a moment?”

She nods and he drifts forwards a little more.

“Yasha, I-” he casts his eyes to the floor, uncharacteristically humble-looking. “I guess I just wanted to apologise if I’ve been distant towards you.”

She blanches, not sure how to proceed. “That’s okay.”

“No. It’s not. I don’t trust easily anymore,” he says. “I’ve been… hurt by people in the past. People I was close with… this was just a tipping point.”

Yasha’s heart sinks. “I understand.”

“But I was _wrong_ , Yasha,” Fjord urges. He doesn’t step closer to her. He knows better than that. But he still locks eyes with her. “It was out of your control – it wasn’t your fault.”

She knows on a logical level that his words ring true, but she can’t make them stick. She can’t get rid of that dark shame, that bubbling anger.

Fjord has a new scar on his collarbone, small and jagged. Yasha doesn’t remember if she’s the one who gave it to him or not.

 _“Forgive me anyway,”_ she sings.

“What was that?” Fjord asks, putting his pouting aside for just a moment; he’s always been more curious than spiteful, that man.

Yasha smiles weakly. “Words I do not deserve to say.”

“They’re beautiful,” he says. Yasha wonders when he started being so honest. “You don’t… you don’t speak Celestial a lot, do you?”

“It’s the language of angels,” Yasha says. “I’m not sure it’s right for me to speak holy words after everything I’ve done.”

She expects him so reiterate his earlier point, tell her she’s blameless in all this.

“Why?” he asks instead, surprising her. “Who you are… it’s not something you earn. It’s something you are.”

If Yasha were quicker on her feet and a little bit meaner, she would make a comment about how she’s never heard Fjord speak Orcish in the entire time she’s known him. Is that not who _he_ is?

But she just stares at him in stunned silence.

“Who says you’re undeserving?” he continues, amber eyes staring into the very centre of her. “Who says you can’t be holy?”

She opens her mouth to respond, but all she can think of is Fjord. A half-monster tethered to an abomination, a conduit for sickly power. Undeserving, one might say, but here he is – fallen into the embrace of the Wildmother, into the strong arms of divinity. Deserving.

“Don’t try to adhere someone else’s idea of what you should be,” he says. This time he does get closer to her, placing a gentle, placating hand on her arm. “That’s something I had to learn – and it took a long fucking time to learn it. But I think I’m better for it now, Yasha… I’m just being me. I’m defining myself.”

“O-okay,” she says softly, finding her voice.

Fjord blinks. “Sorry. That was kinda heavy.”

“N-no… it was good, I think.”

He gives her a smile, and she give him one too. He leaves, and she stays behind. She stares at the flowers on her wall and tries to define herself.

Yasha is not holy. She does not love like the angel Zuala had seen in her. She does not love the world – nor does she love herself. But she does love. That is not a question.

She loves violently and wholly and without restraint. She is shattered stained glass and lightning. She is mud and blood and rain.

She loves the Mighty Nein. She loves their house and their laughter and the flowers on her walls.

She loves Zuala and she loves Molly.

So, for just that night, if one were to listen closely, they would hear Rosohna’s sky filled with the songs of heaven.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Touching people’s lives in a positive way is as close as I can get to an idea of religion.” — Keith Haring. 
> 
> Hey it's been a while! To make up for it, here's the longest piece I've written for this collection so far. Yasha was a hard voice for me to find, but her recent story gave me the motivation to finish this. She's definitely one of my favourite characters, but I still found it hard to grasp what I wanted to do with this piece. In the end it became less of a deep dive into language and more of a character study. I hope you enjoy it all the same! 
> 
> Next Up: Orcish.


	6. Orcish

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Fjord finds his own voice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue.”  
> — William Shakespeare, Hamlet Act 3 Scene 2
> 
> Actual warnings: This chapter is definitely where the Fantasy Racism tag earns its keep. Sorry.

There are few in this world born with language: The Gods, perhaps, and the celestials, fiends, and fey that skitter beneath them. Not mortals, though. Languages are learned things, given to children by those that raise them. Birthright.

Fjord is raised in an orphanage. He has no birthright. He does not learn the language of his race until he is old enough to speak another’s first. He does not find his voice until much later.

Like many things in Fjord Stone’s young life, the name he is given is not his. ‘Stone’ is an orphanage name; one they give to children who come without one of their own. Like his clothes and his shoes and his bed, Fjord’s name is a borrowed thing, a hand-me-down, a faceless heirloom.

Fjord is different and he’s bullied for it. He hears stories of orcs, like all the children do, tales of murderous hordes that rape and pillage. Beasts with sharp teeth and dark blood. For Fjord these stories are not just stories, they are personal. They are what his peers use as excuses to torment him.

He’s their only target for a very long time, but that is not to say Fjord has never met another of orcish blood.

The other half-orc at the orphanage arrives when Fjord is ten years old.

Her name is Ovak and her name is the first Orcish word Fjord ever hears. It means _Bright_ , he will later learn. The other children pretend they can’t pronounce it, complain about its harsh sounds, but Fjord privately commits it to memory.

Ovak, who is given the last name Glen and isn’t happy about it, has dark-green skin like him. Her hair is cropped close to her skull and her tusks are sharp and terrifying. She is stronger than any of the boys her age and matches paces with the older kids easily. She’s fifteen when Fjord is ten, and she’s already more than two heads taller than he is.

The other children jeer. They laugh, _how does it feel to be overshadowed by a dumb girl?_ But Fjord doesn’t care. He likes her too much to care.

He is not subtle. He follows her around the orphanage and out of it, on her chores and on her errands, he’s a constant shadow. Fjord has always had more curiosity than sense, after all.

“Why do you follow me, _Krah?”_ She asks one day. She’s chopping firewood in the yard and he’s watching her.

“What does ‘krah’ mean?” He asks instead of answering.

She gives him a look. “It is the name for those younger than you in the tribe.”

_Is this a tribe?_ Fjord wants to ask _. This shitty orphanage by the sea?_ But instead he asks, “In Orcish?”

Ovak stops working at that, turning to regard Fjord with calculating eyes. She leans her axe against her knee. “You do not speak the Horde-Tongue, _Krah?_ What is your parentage?”

Fjord shrugs. “I dunno. I’ve been here forever, basically.”

“That will not do,” Ovak shakes her head, then points to herself. “I am Ovak-of-Othe, daughter of Gyr. Who are you?”

“I’m Fjord… of Damali?” Fjord says tentatively. “Son of… someone?”

Ovak nods.

“Fjord is a good name,” she says. “I will teach you the Horde-Tongue, Fjord-of-Damali. I will see you earn your blood.”

He doesn’t care to ask what exactly that means.

Not many are adopted from the Driftwood Asylum—not even those children who doll themselves up and bat their lashes when noble-folk grace the seaside home with their presence. Those that are adopted tend to be humans or elves, or, perhaps, the occasional halfling or gnome. Half-orcs are not adopted. Not once. Not ever.

So, Ovak-of-Othe and Fjord-of-Damali don’t spend their days kissing the boots of lords and ladies looking for a child to make them feel kinder. No. On such days, the two of them will wander down to the beach. They will sit shoulder to shoulder under windswept manuka trees, with their branches bowed back in reverence to the sea. They will sit among the beach grasses, listening to the birds, and Ovak will teach Fjord Orcish.

She’s not a very good teacher, all in all, but after months of lessons Fjord can at least say he’s got a grasp on it. He masters the accent quickly, even if the words come later.

“Why do you file your tusks, _Krah?”_ Ovak asks one day.

“The kids make fun of me,” he answers honestly. “I don’t want to give them reason to call me a monster. I’m already bigger than them.”

Ovak nods. “Makes sense,” she says. “It is smart to take weapons from your enemies before they can use them.”

Many years later, a wiser and older Fjord will look back on this conversation and realise Ovak’s answer had been the wrong one. But he will suppose, rightly so, that it had been the answer of a scared child—one who had been hurt like him and didn’t want to be hurt again. He won’t blame her.

Ovak dies when Fjord is eleven. She’s killed in a street brawl in town, beaten to death so severely she’s barely recognisable. The men who did it say she attacked them first—they were just defending themselves from her brutish anger.

And they’re believed. Of course they are. They are human, non-threatening, not like Ovak with her tusks and her skin and her broad shoulders. They walk free, with Ovak’s blood under their nails.

The orphanage buries her, and Fjord knows it’s wrong. Ovak told him the Horde burns their dead.

But Fjord doesn’t say this aloud. He goes home and he files his tusks down for good measure. He stays quiet and out of the way.

He never speaks Orcish again.

Fjord meets Vandren ten years later. He’s left the orphanage and fallen in with a shitty crew. They meant nothing to him and, evidently, he meant the same to them. Because he’s in a jail cell alone, and they’re halfway to Nicodranas.

“Your lucky day, dickhead,” the guard drawls, tugging the cell door open. “Some idiot just paid your bail.”

Fjord is led back out into the light of day and faced with the aforementioned idiot—his saviour. He’s a middle-aged human man with tanned skin and shaggy, salt-and-pepper hair and a smile like the sun. He beams as Fjord draws closer.

“Hey kid,” he drawls. “Nice to see you again.”

“You’re the guy we tried to rob,” Fjord says. It’s a useless thing to say, they both know it, but Vandren smiles.

“Keyword being ‘tried’,” he says. “How about you and I get out of here?”

Fjord thinks back to the damp cell and quickly decides he’d like nothing less than leaving.

Vandren takes him to the docks, and Fjord is just as transfixed by the gentle lapping of ocean waves underfoot as he is by the towering ships that surround them like walls. Vandren takes him to the very end, where a large dark-wood ship with a mermaid on the bow sits, poised to shoot back out to sea.

_Tide’s Breath_ , it says.

“Why are you runnin’ around with a crew like that, kid?” Vandren asks.

“I dunno,” Fjord says, hating how he mumbles. Vandren is so blinding… so _commanding_ with just his presence. Fjord feels small next to it all. “I guess no one else would take me. It was easier to fall in with that shit than keep trying.”

“It’s what they expected of you, ain’t it?” Vandren says. He looks out at the horizon, past all the boats to the sun-glimmering sea beyond. “Lookin’ the way you do. They expect you to be a mean motherfucker.”

Fjord follows Vandren’s line of sight, seeing nothing but the ocean.

“Let me give you some advice, son,” Vandren says, clasping him on the shoulder. “If you let this world rule you, you ain’t ever gonna make your own way in it. Don’t be what they want you to be, you hear?”

Fjord’s first thought is: _Oh._

Fjord’s second thought is: _No one’s ever called me “son” before._

Fjord’s third thought is: _I will follow this man to the ends of the earth._

Fjord joins Vandren’s crew for work, but what he finds is a home.

He’s not sure what having a father is supposed to feel like, on account of never knowing his own, but he’d like to think it feels like this:

Strong, wind-chaffed hands guiding his, telling him where to tie the rigging just so. Shaping his grip on the ship’s wheel as he steers. Clapping him on the shoulder.

A bellowing laugh and a blinding smile.

Lessons.

Vandren.

Years go by and Fjord realises he’s found a family in the man. Ovak would probably liken it to the Horde—this idea of a clan, a group of one’s own choosing, that an individual can tie their heart to. But Fjord won’t call it a Horde. He never would, no matter how much the sea makes him feel like he can, at least somewhat, leave the nature expected of him behind.

_Don’t be what they want you to be,_ Vandren tells him.

So, Fjord thinks, instead, about what he wants to be. What kind of person does he want to fashion himself into?

The answer is always the same. His eyes are drawn to the presence at the ship’s wheel, the strong presence that glows like sunfire, with salt-and-pepper hair and a voice that makes men tremble.

_I think I’d be okay with being that,_ he thinks.

Sabian joins Vandren’s crew when Fjord is twenty-five. He’s half-elven and smaller than Fjord, which leads Fjord to make the mistake of thinking he’d have any kind of advantage over him.

He doesn’t, of course he doesn’t. Sabian is quick and self-assured and everything Fjord wishes he was. But they still become friends easily, and from Sabian Fjord learns everything Vandren couldn’t teach him.

Sabian teaches him how to sword-fight—properly, not the playful, clumsy shit he’d practiced at the orphanage. Fjord teaches him how to steer the ship. Sabian teaches him how to dance. Fjord teaches him how to lie.

At night, Sabian plays his lute and the crew tell stories. Fjord’s in particular are popular, mostly for his voices. He’s pretty damn good at impressions.

(He does an _excellent_ Vandren)

But Fjord spends most of this time watching Sabian play. The wood-elves his mother hailed from were great poets, he’d told him once. Those clever hands, plucking out effortless tunes, are his birthright. Fjord doesn’t have a birthright; he has the lessons Vandren’s taught him and the reputation of a monster and a coward he’s trying not to live up to.

He thinks it’s working, for a time. But that’s the thing about blood. It never leaves you.

“I think I realised something, Fjord,” Sabian says. His voice is soft in the dark. He is a man of contradictions; So small, but he straddles Fjord’s hips with surprising strength. So stern and commanding above deck, but his breath is feather-light on Fjord’s skin, hushed words carried along cool lips.

Sabian shifts and Fjord looks up at him in the moonlight of their shared inn room. The other man’s eyes are glimmering, hazel turned silver, and they stare into him. Sabian tightens his grip on Fjord’s hand, and Fjord becomes acutely aware of how small it is… how slender those clever fingers are in comparison to his.

“I think if you were anyone else, I might love you,” he whispers, no trace of a smile. “Isn’t that awful thing to think?”

It is awful, but Fjord’s first thought isn’t that. His first thought is that he gets it. He feels Sabian’s small hand in his and he understands. How could anyone love something like him?

He doesn’t have a birthright. The attempt to give him one ended with blood and death and wrongful burial. Ovak-of-Othe had attempted to help him earn his blood, but that blood had been what killed her. Fjord had tried to erase any connection he had to it, out of safety and then out of shame. But blood never leaves you.

He’s charismatic and handsome and as silver tongued as any bard. But underneath it all, Fjord is a liar. He’s afraid if anyone gets too close that’ll be all they’ll see. They’ll see the scared boy beneath… and the monster he’s so scared of being, tucked away. Sabian knows he’s a liar—Fjord’s the one who taught him how to lie back. 

_Don’t be what they want you to be._ And he isn’t. He is, instead, a patchwork of borrowed charisma and stolen confidence, and under it all he’s nothing. He’s always been nothing. And how can nothing be loved?

Two days later, _Tide’s Breath_ is destroyed from within. Sabian’s clever hands tear apart the first home Fjord ever made for himself.

He wakes up on a beach with a foreign blade at his fingertips, saltwater in his lungs, and betrayal at his back.

And he thinks _What am I to do with this?_ and _Where am I to go?_ and _I’m going to fucking kill him._

Like many things in Fjord Stone’s life, the power he is given is not his. But for the first time in his life, he begins to think he can use it to be something. To fashion himself anew. To be more than nothing.

He heads north, with unknown power at his fingertips, wearing Vandren’s voice like a shield.

His stance changes, of course. Basing your self-worth on eldritch powers given to you by an evil demi-god of the sea isn’t the best of ideas. Not that Fjord’s ever been known for those.

He notices too late that the person he’s been fashioning himself into is a person he doesn’t want to be. He’s short-tempered and reckless and cold and by the time he decides the face reflected in the waves isn’t one he recognises, he’s at Ukotoa’s doorstep, realising he doesn’t want to finish what Avantika started, either.

_Don’t be what they want you to be._

He turns his back on the coast, on Ukotoa, on everything but the Mighty Nein. He heads north again with friends—maybe family—by his side and he hears Ovak’s voice whisper ‘Horde’ in his mind but keeps Vandren’s wrapped tight around his own. The eyes of a spurned sea-beast are on him and he doesn’t look over his shoulder until the horizon is dry.

Xhorhas is… new.

He gets called handsome in the Empire, sure, but he’s never been _ordinary_ before. In Xhorhas, it’s Beau and Caleb who hide their faces from suspicious glares, it’s Fjord and Jester and Nott who become the faces of the group over and over and over.

It all comes to a head with Wursh.

The blacksmith is much bigger than Fjord in a way that reminds him of Ovak. He’s big, with sweat on his brow and tattoos on his arms. Fjord knows his younger self would be impressed, wide-eyed and curious in the same way he had been with the older half-orc girl. He’s always had more curiosity than sense—but he thinks he’s learned the value of silence in the many years since then, too. He exercises it now, resorting to a quiet, futile attempt to make himself look bigger.

He calls him ‘runt’ and Fjord bristles in a manner he knows is childish. He’s curt with him after that—defensive—because he doesn’t want to be a monster, but he doesn’t want to be small, either.

“What’s your name?” Wursh asks.

It’s too much. He leaves. Back into the street and out of the suffocating, familiar strangeness of Wursh’s presence and questions he doesn’t want to answer. But life has never made things easy for Fjord, and he’s closely followed by the larger man.

“Hey!” Wursh calls, and Fjord is embarrassed at how quickly he falls into line. “C’mere a second. I wanna talk to you.”

“What d’you need?” Fjord asks dryly.

Wursh eyes him with more scrutiny than Fjord has received in a long time. It makes his skin crawl, that gaze. He hates it. He wants to leave. His feet are rooted to the floor.

“You walk around like you’ve got something to prove,” Wursh observes.

Fjord feels rage prickle in his chest—in his mouth and lungs like smoke. “Is that what it looks like?” He says, voice mirthless.

Wursh is unfazed. “From where I’m standing, yeah.”

He doesn’t let Fjord get a word in. “Lemme tell you something,” he says. “It don’t matter. Yeah, we got history. Some of us… we don’t let that blood rule us. I know you feel the anger there, every now and again, but don’t let them define you.”

It’s unsolicited advice but it hits Fjord like an arrow to the heart.

_Don’t be what they want you to be._

He leaves quickly, after that.

He loses his powers. He knows that if he’s not this patchwork thing he’s built himself to be then he’s back to being nothing. He’s back to being a scared little boy, and if he’s not that scared little boy he’s a monster instead. The demon-thing that lives at the bottom of the sea and under his skin holds his powers above him like meat above a starving dog, and only give it back when the bubbles of rebellion in Fjord’s chest have settled.

He goes to Wursh by choice.

He thanks him for his words, thinks he’s going to leave it at that, but he doesn’t. In Wursh’s shop, in the shadow of a man so much like him and so different, he opens a piece of his heart he hasn’t opened for years.

“I only heard stories about that wild side,” Fjord says. “It was what most people expected my reaction to be—one of anger and rage and violence—”

“I’ll tell you what,” Wursh says, cutting Fjord’s words short without malice. “I’ve been to a few Empire establishments—making my way south—looking like the way I do. And I’ve seen some orcs do some terrible things. I’ve seen ‘em be violent and angry… _unfair_. But hell, if I haven’t seen plenty of humans, dwarves, elves, half-elves be the _exact_ same. It’s all perspective. It’s all about the other.”

There’s an old hurt in the way he says it, but it’s tempered. Like the steel Wursh forges, his pain has burned and cooled and made him stronger.

Fjord feels like he’s been set adrift. His next words are a line thrown to shore.

“When they look at you in that way what do you do?” He doesn’t know what answer he wants, so he gives Wursh options. “Shake it off? Give them a look?”

“Both,” Wursh laughs. “You pick and choose your fights.”

Fjord thinks about Ovak, about how she told him it was smart to take weapons from enemies before they could use them. He thinks about how that was the wrong answer. He thinks about how this one is a little better.

“Are you happy here?” Fjord asks.

Wursh takes a while to answer.

“For now.”

Maybe that’s enough, Fjord thinks. Maybe that’s all a person needs. A ‘for now’. His life has never been constant—like the sea he’s spent so much of it on—it shifts and changes under him. Maybe a ‘for now’ is all he can ask for.

“What do you dream,” Caduceus asks. “When your dreams are your own?”

Fjord knows the answer immediately. It’s always been the same thing.

The sea.

He dreams of crystal blue waves and sea birds above him, of fine sand in his toes and the heavenly mix of freezing water and the hot prickle of a burgeoning sunburn. He dreams of windswept manuka trees on a little pebble beach. He dreams of Vandren’s ship, skirting the waves. He dreams of losing himself. He dreams of freedom.

And when Caduceus hears this and smiles, Fjord is suddenly struck by the fact that the things he’s mentioned are all _his_. They’re not a part of his patchwork-self, nor are they a part of the self he hides. His dreams of the sea are a sliver of Fjord Stone that isn’t ascribed to one box or another. It’s just… _his_.

So, he stands in the belly of a volcano, sword arm outstretched and blade trembling.

He threatens the beast, the one with lashing binds around his soul, in the voice he had tried to hide away. It is so rarely used nowadays, but it’s still his and his alone and he slips into the accent like one would a well-worn jacket. It belongs to him.

He drives the blade into his chest, inch by inch, and he feels his blood seep free. This is the blood that killed Ovak. The blood he tried to run from. The blood Wursh told him not to be ruled by. Vandren had told him something similar. _Don’t be what they want you to be_ , he’d said, and Fjord thinks now that maybe he’d misunderstood him.

That maybe Vandren hadn’t meant for him to erase himself. Maybe he had meant, instead, for Fjord to stop caring, to be who he wanted to be without ever letting someone define what that means.

He feels Ukotoa inside him, cloying and vicious. The sea-beast is angry. Fjord feels the Horde-Tongue, too, dry and unused in his mouth. He doesn’t speak it, but he lets it sit there, closer to the surface than he’s let it be in two decades. It’s an angry thing too, that language, and though it hasn’t passed his lips since those days on the beach in Port Damali, Fjord knows it’s enough a part of him to deserve to see what happens next.

Fjord may not know much, but he knows this:

He is Fjord of the Mighty Nein and he will no longer be told what he is and what he isn’t.

That blinding anger in the blade, for just a moment, turns fearful.

In the fires of the Kiln, the Sword of Fathoms burns and dies.

Much later, Fjord floats in the embrace of a warm ocean, and a Goddess gives him a choice.

“Will you be my champion?” she asks.

He thinks it’s the first time anyone’s ever let him _choose_.

“I will.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's MY fic mom says I get to pick the precise nature of Fjord and Sabian's relationship!
> 
> If you're interested y'all should check out [my fjord playlist!](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3ZgYBaA2J4wqD9fXA3CJxG?si=BI5XyaCURB6qJgb421wM8A) It's basically all I listened to while writing this chapter. 
> 
> As always thanks for reading!! Hope you and your loved ones are all staying safe in quarantine or whatever other measures you're under. Kia kaha!

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! You can find me on tumblr @fizzityuck or twitter @claregormy if you wanna yell at me (kindly)


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